Coffee + beer, the cafe needs innovation is the way out.

In the Modern Times brewery, you can enjoy a cup of coffee and beer at any time. Photo: Amy Krone.

There are a dazzling number of beer brands, and there are local best-selling products in every place. You may know some familiar big brands, such as Heineken in the Netherlands, Carlsberg in Denmark, Cromebacher in Germany, Chimay in Belgium, skol in Brazil, Guinness in the UK, Snow in China and, of course, Budweiser in the United States, but you certainly don't know Modern Times, an artisanal brewery in California (Modern Times). What's more, I don't know about their new unique beer: coffee beer. As shown in the picture above, a woman is drinking a cup of cold and delicious coffee and beer at Modern Times Brewery.

Coffee and beer are two unrelated drinks. The former is extracted from roasted coffee beans, while the latter is brewed from grains such as barley, wheat or rice. But brewing beer with coffee beans is an area of innovation that the world's beer industry is trying to innovate. Many brewers are trying to use a variety of beers, including white beer and ale, to brew coffee with various roasted degrees, and even use the expensive Kopi Luwak (KopiLuwak) to brew the more expensive civet coffee beer. But by far the most successful is Modern Times Brewery's coffee beer, whose secret is the coffee beans used in brewing.

AleSmith, also based in San Diego, recently tried to brew dark beer from coffee beans from Speedway roasters. They put the coffee beans in bourbon barrels and brewed them with dark beer, and unexpectedly, coffee, dark beer and bourbon taste well together. Unlike them, ModernTimes first stores raw coffee beans in bourbon barrels to mature for several months, taking advantage of the fact that raw coffee beans can easily absorb the smell of the surrounding environment, absorbing the taste of the original barrel, changing the original flavor of the raw coffee beans, bringing the flavor of the wine barrel, and then pouring the coffee beans into the beer.

It has been nearly a decade since Ceremony Coffee Roasters first tried to use wine buckets to store coffee and raw beans. Raw coffee beans are easy to absorb peculiar smell, which is originally a disadvantage. Coffee roasters and coffee roasters have tried their best to prevent raw coffee beans from being contaminated with environmental odor. However, some innovative coffee roasters cleverly take advantage of this to allow coffee beans to fully absorb the smell of wood and alcohol in the barrel.

This may sound incredible, but really challenging roasters will choose different buckets to store raw coffee beans according to the characteristics of different wines, and try their best to make the coffee beans retain the various flavors of the barrels in the roasting process. Therefore, the coffee produced also has a strong wine and oak aroma, and such coffee beans are naturally sought after by coffee lovers.

Modern Times Coffee. Figure: Amy Krone.

Today, roasters who devote themselves to the "Third-wave" wave of coffee are using this technique. JacobMcKean, founder of Modern Times, says coffee roasting has been part of their brewing company's job from the start. He loves coffee and beer and sells it all over the country as his company's main product. Since he tried to bake coffee at home, he began to study how to combine roasting with beer brewing. To this end, he also installed a coffee roaster in the brewing workshop.

The coffee beans used by Modern Times Brewery are all roasted by themselves, and the beer used to match them is their own dark beer. Nowadays, with the continuous enrichment of experience and knowledge, their Black House coffee beans are becoming more and more popular.

Modern Times Brewery Brewery is located in Point Loma, San Diego, California, USA. JacobMcKean, the boss, said Modern Times was the first company to use beer buckets to store raw beans to brew coffee beer. They will add a tasting room and expand the coffee business.

Innovation is an eternal topic. In an increasingly competitive business society, there is no way out without innovation, and so is the coffee industry. In recent years, cafes have become a growing trend in the world, and the competition among cafes has become increasingly fierce, but it is gratifying to see some innovations brought about by the development of the coffee industry, such as the cultivation of coffee, the emergence of new varieties such as Castiere and Barton, and breakthroughs in the research of genetically modified coffee. In the process of coffee processing, new methods such as semi-washing and honey treatment have been created. In the process of coffee production, variable pressure extraction and negative pressure extraction of coffee (or coffee / tea) machines have been born, which have injected new vitality into the development of the coffee industry. However, what the author is most interested in is the coffee pulp / coffee leaf tea that appears in the process of coffee raw bean processing, that is, coffee tea like tea is made from coffee peel and pulp directly thrown away in the past, or coffee leaves that have not been used at all in the past. A foreign company unexpectedly pushed its price up to more than 1000 US dollars / kg. China is a big tea-making and tea-drinking country, so it should not be difficult to make a coffee-fruit tea, and because we have the habit of drinking tea, the market of coffee-fruit-tea may be much better than that of coffee.

In the history of the spread of coffee, cafes and bars seem to be incompatible with each other, because bars are more built than cafes, and new cafes are generally regarded by bars as competitors and take away their guests. Especially in London in the 18th century, there was a coffee war between men and women in London because women were not allowed to go in and out of cafes. But cafes, like bars, take root all over the world. Nowadays, if you can drink beer in a cafe and coffee in a bar, it will benefit not only cafe owners and bar operators, but also consumers. Coffee and beer, innovation is the way out.

Run, brothers!

Source: Huang Wei boutique coffee roasting blog