Coffee has featured heavily in the Courier Mail this week with Natascha Mirosch looking at all aspects of our caffeinated friend.
It may be a surprise to many, but coffee can pair wonderfully with beer.
For Australians, who equate ‘beer’ with the pale amber fluid that comes in a can labelled Tooheys, VB or XXXX, the suggestion that beer and coffee could be drunk together might bring on scornful looks.
But just as the majority of Australians once thought good coffee came in a jar, they are now discovering that there is a world of beer out there, and it can provide some interesting pairings.
To get your head around the notion of beer and coffee, you must first adjust your understanding of what beer is. The commercial lagers known to most Australian drinkers are beers with the flavour turned down low. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. These are beers that are designed to be drunk after mowing the lawn, or downed one after another at the footie when you don’t want to be distracted by flavour. They aren’t designed to exhibit flavours of tiramisu or go with a macchiato.
For this job you need a beer that has a bit of strong flavour to match up with the bitterness of coffee. With winter coming on a good stout works perfectly – and before you say it, they don’t all taste like Guinness. Cascade makes a rich, chocolaty stout with plenty of rich toffee to it that pairs beautifully with a well-made flat white. It’s a beer to change the minds of the ‘I don’t like dark beers’ set.
If you prefer your coffee short and black, a bit of sweetness from the beer can work very nicely with it. It can be a little hard to come by in Brisbane, but Adelaide brewery BrewBoys makes a peated Scotch ale called Seeing Double that is low on hop bitterness, but long on malt to marry beautifully with the roast bitterness of the coffee. If you can’t find it, the dried fruit notes and rich mouthfeel of a Belgian beer such as Chimay Red will work well too.
Perhaps the best pairing of coffee and beer is when the coffee is in the beer, as was shown by local brewery Burleigh Brewing with their excellent Black Giraffe beer made in partnership with Zaraffas Coffee. It was exceptional and paired perfectly with good quality vanilla icecream.
Beer affogato anyone?
