How to Add the Beans to Your Coffee Beer

There are many different ways of adding coffee to your beer recipe.  Coffee can be added as whole beans, ground, crushed or cracked, drip brewed, espresso brewed, from a French-press, cold-brewed, ice brewed, or as an extract or concentrate.  Each method has proponents who make really great coffee beer.  The more highly ground the coffee is, the higher the surface area to liquid ratio and the more flavor and aroma you will get.  One tip when adding coffee grounds to your recipe, no matter how you grind the beans, it is best to add them to your beer in a grain or hops bag to prevent clogging of your tubing and to make clean-up easier. 

When to Add Coffee in the Brewing Process

Coffee can be added at any stage of brewing from first wort additions to packaging.  When added early on in the brewing process, such as in the boil kettle, some of the flavor and aroma notes may be boiled off and the resulting coffee beer will have a more subtle coffee aroma and flavor.  Kettle additions may also impart a harshness and bitterness from the extra acids that are developed so it may be a better method for darker beers that have the roasted flavors to hide any excess bite.

Later additions in the cool side of the process, during primary and secondary fermentation, can lead to a more robust coffee flavor that may be too much for some beer drinkers.  But if added judiciously, the roasted coffee character will blend harmoniously with the malt flavors to give the coffee beer a multi-dimensional profile. 

What if you want to avoid the potential for astringent flavors altogether?  How about adding coffee to your coffee beer recipe just before bottling or kegging.  This is done by many commercial brewers with good results.

One thousand and one.

How Many Beans to Add

One of the main issues of making a coffee beer is how strong of a coffee flavor do you want to add?  In a large part, this depends on how much coffee you add.  Intuitively, adding more coffee gives you a more pronounced coffee flavor and aroma in your beer.  There is definitely a threshold where adding too much will overpower your beer, ruining the entire batch, unless you like carbonated coffee.  Using less will give you a more subtle touch, but it may end up disappearing in the roasted malt flavors of many of the most popular coffee beer styles.  This is one of those recipe elements where you are going to have to do some research.  Find a commercial coffee beer you enjoy and see if there are any recipe details online.  If not, try calling the brewery and tell them that you are a homebrewer who would like to make a beer similar to theirs but need a percentage of coffee to start your recipe with.  You should have no problem finding coffee beer recipes on many of the more popular homebrew forums.  For a 6 gallon recipe of Breakfast Stout, I added 2 ounces of fine ground Sumatra coffee at flame-out, and another 2 ounces of Kona during secondary.  The coffee notes were amazing.

Carton Brewery’s Regular Coffee  Imperial Cream Ale is brewed with lactose sugar and Ethiopian Sidamo and Mexican Chiapas coffee beans.  They use a half gallon of double-brewed coffee per 20 gallons of beer.  The beer has a darker yellow color, kind of a straw-and-hay color.  The roasted coffee notes blend with the cloying sweetness of the lactose and the creamy mouthfeel from the extra alcohol to deliver a unique take on coffee beer with “milk and 2 sugars”.