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Christina Perozzi (Goose Island Beer Co.) on Bourbon County Coffee Stout

I’m happy to be here representing Goose Island, from Chicago. Greg Hall, our founder’s son, was a brewmaster – David Walker mentioned him earlier – who was a crazy genius brewer. He really came up with the idea for bourbon barrel aging, and came up with the idea of throwing some coffee in some beer. We literally share a wall with Intelligentsia in Chicago, so we have beer wafting one way, and everyone making coffee, wishing they were making beer, and you have coffee lofting the other way, and everyone making beer, wishing they were drinking coffee, and also beer. It’s really a marriage made in heaven. It was destiny that Intelligentsia Coffee and Goose Island come together. Bourbon County stout is a base beer that we make this Bourbon County coffee stout with. It’s a beer that has a crazy, insane cult following. I’ve almost been punched in the face because of this beer. There’s just not enough of it being made, and there’s a huge demand for it, because it’s really awesome.

It’s a Russian Imperial Stout that’s aged in Heaven Hill bourbon barrels for a year. In Chicago, you have four seasons, which is very important in bourbon barrel aging, because you have really hot summers where the beer in the barrel is sucked into the wood and it’s able to pick up all the flavors of the char inside, and the bourbon, and the vanilla, and the coconut, all those flavors from the barrel. And then you have those super cold months where the wood contracts and pushes the beer back into the barrel, bringing all those flavors with it. It’s very important that it does age for a year, completely non-temperature controlled. Chicago, being where it is and having those four seasons, is quintessential why the beer tastes the way it does. We cold press the coffee. We’ve done this for three years with Intelligentsia coffee. This year, we did La Tortuga.

Jay Cunningham: This Bourbon County has a coffee from Honduras called La Tortuga, which is our mark for this coffee from this family. It’s actually three farms from this family called the Caballero family. We work directly with them. This coffee is a perfect choice because it has this cask-y, almost cedar undertone to the coffee, which marries really nicely with the bourbon barrels. This is 2012, so it’s a nice coffee. The other thing this coffee has is a sweet-sour acidity, almost like a tamarind, purple flavor to it, which is really nice, complements the sweetness.

Christina Perozzi: I will warn you that this beer is 14.3% ABV, and it’s delicious and it’s viscous and it’s oily and it’s chocolate, it’s vanilla, it’s caramel. From the coffee, you get floral, you peaches, you get mango, you get tropical fruit. It’s a mélange of flavors that changes as it opens up. It changes as it warms up, so please enjoy this beer, and know that you are special for drinking it.

Mitch Steele (Stone Brewing Co.): on 15th Anniversary Escondidian Imperial Black IPA with Espresso

This beer is two years old. When we brew our anniversary beer, typically what we do is we take a small amount of it, put it into casks and add some extra ingredients to it. One of the ingredients we added was Ryan Brothers espresso, from San Diego. That’s the coffee that we actually serve at work. It’s really very nice coffee. We love the beer so much, we still were producing the 15th anniversary when we did the cask, and we liked it so much, we diverted about 50 barrels of it into a tank and did a full batch of the beer with the espresso. That’s what you’re going to have tonight. It is a couple years old. This beer was dry-hopped with Nelson Sauvin. It was the first time we used Nelson Sauvin in a beer, and it’s a pretty high strength beer. It’s a little bit different than our regular black IPA. We used the midnight wheat from Briess in it, instead of Karratha malt, and it was just amazing to me how well the coffee worked in a hoppy beer, because we weren’t expecting it to work. The flavors just came together nicely, and it just changed my opinion on brewing beers with coffee and having a really strong hop presence in the beer. It can work in the right beer, and we’ve done a couple of them now. This was the first one. This was also the first coffee beer we made that we haven’t added coffee on the brewhouse side. Normally what we do is add coffee to the whirlpool, where the wort is 185 – 200 degrees Fahrenheit and let the coffee steep, and we add some cold-pressed coffee on the back end. This one’s all cold-press, just because of the nature of the beer and how we brewed it…For this one, we ground the coffee and put it in bags and put ‘em in a tank and put the beer on top of it for about three days.

Jeremy Raub (Eagle Rock Brewery) on Gold Line

Stephen [Morrissey] pitched this idea to me a couple months ago. One of the ideas was to pair a special beer with espresso…I was intrigued of course by the idea…One of the challenges was pairing the coffee with the beer. So much of we’ve experienced tonight is us as brewers pairing our beers with coffee. I said, “Yes, why not? That sounds fun.” We did a beer, and the beer is named Gold Line, in honor of the Gold Line that connects Pasadena to the rest of L.A. Probably many of you rode the Gold Line tonight. This beer that you’re going to be able to try is a variation of one of our regular beers, which is our Xtra Pale Ale. We infused it with a shitload of citrus peel, a little bit of lactose to boost the body, and just a tiny hint of vanilla. The idea was that we wanted to make a beer that was very, very citrusy, and fruity, but had a little more body to mimic some of the really nice, fruity, acidic coffees that these guys are presenting all year long. The challenge was that the barista here would be able to take that beer and use his skill or his talents to pair an espresso shot with that beer. I give you Gold Line.

Stephen Morrissey: I was saying to Michael earlier, “I think it’s going pretty well.” He said, “It’s a beer event. People get boozy, they get happy,” whereas at coffee events, we just stay agitated all the time. It’s extremely true, and you can tell by how everyone’s stirring more and more as the night goes on…The beer was delivered yesterday, and [barista] Casey [Soloria] has been working feverishly for the last 24 hours to find out what works well. Do talk to Casey, find out what he’s serving, how he’s serving it.

To top Gold Line, barista Casey Soloria prepared Kenya Ndraoini coffee as espresso, choosing “round body, with a little bit of citrus in the finish.”