Craft brewers tend to be pretty fussy about what coffee they kick-start the day with, so it's hardly surprising some have found ways to combine the two beverages.

Brad Rogers was one of the first Australians to introduce coffee beans into the brewing process with Crema, a coffee-infused pale ale he created while head brewer at Matilda Bay. One wag suggested it was the perfect beer to wash down bacon and eggs.

In darker beers, heavily roasted malted barley can produce its own coffee-like flavours - it is similarly drum-roasted at relatively high temperatures - so it's a fairly obvious step to add some actual coffee beans into a stout recipe.

Long-running American craft brewer Redhook released its Double Black Stout in 1995 using Starbucks coffee; Founders Breakfast Stout features oatmeal, chocolate and vanilla, as well as coffee beans.

So many American breweries are now producing coffee beers, there is a separate category for them at the annual Great American Beer Festival.

Not to be outdone, Danish brewery Mikkeller makes perhaps the world's rarest coffee beer - Beer Geek Breakfast Weasel - with kopi luwak, the Indonesian coffee made with beans swallowed by the cat-like civet. Later, the beans are retrieved from the animal's faeces, cleaned and roasted to make a decidedly expensive cup of coffee.

Faced with the challenge of creating a new winter release, Matilda Bay head brewer Scott Vincent hooked up with Toby's Estate coffee guru Toby Smith.

''I ran into him in Sydney and we ended up talking for ages about different techniques of roasting coffee and malt,'' Vincent says. ''We'd already decided to make a big, robust dark beer that was something between a porter and an imperial stout. We released Crema in 2006 using coffee beans we'd roasted ourselves but this time we wanted to work with the best in the coffee business.''

Smith was invited to visit the Matilda Bay ''Garage'' brewery in Victoria, where he and Vincent had a cupping session using different coffee beans. Cupping involves pouring boiling water over ground coffee in a cup, which results in a crust forming. The crust is broken to release the individual aromas of each coffee.

''It's the same as a beer tasting, where everyone picks up different flavours and aromas,'' Vincent says.

''We decided on an Ethiopian blend called Yirgacheffe, which is highly aromatic and has an unusual peppermint character.''

To introduce the coffee into the brewing process, the beans were coarsely ground and underwent a cold extraction, with the resulting liquid added directly to the fermenting beer, christened Longshot.

''The brewers and I had to work hard to ensure the beer had a subtle balance of coffee and toffee flavours and the oils extracted from the coffee beans didn't ruin the head,'' Vincent says. ''We wanted some nice mocha characters without too much astringency coming through in the finish.''

Matilda Bay Longshot is at Dan Murphy's. $20/four-pack.

TASTING NOTES

MATILDA BAY LONGSHOT (6 per cent) Dark brown/black with faint reddish highlights; creamy, beige foam. Aroma: espresso, caramel, dark chocolate and spice notes. Palate: chewy dark malt initially; luscious, sweet mid-palate, espresso/mocha notes emerging later; finishes dry and roasty with slight oily notes and good balance. Overall: serve at 10C to best appreciate the neatly balanced coffee and dark malt characters.

Source: Epicure