Coffee Beer: A Pick-Me-Up in Your Pint – Charlotte Magazine

Alex Shoenthal appears to have selected the coffee for the 2024 version of Origin Story, a seasonal New England IPA he’s brewed for the past three years. He just hasn’t tasted it yet. He brandishes a bag of beans. “This is a single-origin from China, and I’ve never even heard of it,” says Shoenthal, Lower Left Brewing Co.’s co-founder and head brewer. “It’s sun-dried. It’s not roasted at all. The description sounded great, and these guys have not steered me wrong.”

You never know, though. Brewing can be unpredictable whether it’s coffee or beer, and that goes double for coffee beer. It’s a stifling July morning in Lower Left’s tank room, a good six hours before the LoSo brewery opens for the day. Shoenthal is back here brewing beer and road-testing the coffee he wants to add to a future batch.

“These guys” are Night Swim Coffee, a specialty roaster that serves as Lower Left’s coffee partner and whose roastery happens to be across the street. Shoenthal originally brewed Origin Story to commemorate Night Swim’s first anniversary. That’s one reason for the name. Another is that he uses a different single-origin coffee every year.

Shoenthal fetches a pair of 4-ounce tasting glasses—one for him, one for me—and pours from a French press. This coffee is called Guiben, from Xishuangbanna in Yunnan province; the bag advertises its flavors as “pink lemonade, strawberry candy, and chocolate malt.” The brewed coffee’s color is unusually light, a cloudy caramel that matches the hue of the beans. He sips and smacks his lips. “I can really taste the strawberry.” So can I.

“And it’s got pretty good acidity, which will be nice because when you add a little bit of acidity to a beer like a New England IPA, it’s kind of like adding salt to a dish. It picks up all the other flavors,” Shoenthal adds. “And that kind of lemonade-y acidity on the finish? This gives me a clearer idea of what this is going to taste like in the beer.” He’s a happy brewer. “That’s gonna be really nice. Such different flavors.”

Then, as brewmasters sometimes do, he changes his mind. Two weeks after my visit, Shoenthal sends me an email. “It turns out that the coffee we sampled was too light on actual coffee flavor to use in Origin Story, so I chose a new, bolder bean,” he writes. “The new one is called Finca Rosita and is also a single-origin bean from Caranavi, Bolivia. It is still a lighter coffee, with notes of PB&J, graham cracker, vanilla, and lime.” If you’re reading this and began to salivate over the Guiben coffee from China, you’ll have to check with the folks at Night Swim.

As for Shoenthal, he’ll brew a batch of Origin Story in August and do the same for another coffee beer—Blix (6.4% ABV), an oatmeal stout infused with a Night Swim dark roast—around October. The colder months are typically when independent breweries offer coffee beers, invigorating blends of morning and evening brewed beverages. Charlotte-area brewers make a bunch of them. Most tend to be porters or stouts like Blix: dark, malty heavyweights that pair well with early sunsets. But a few, like Origin Story (6.8% ABV), perform the higher-wire trick of welcoming coffee into other beer styles—and it still works. “The flavors,” Shoenthal says, “are just kind of made for each other.”

A few other notable coffee beers from Charlotte-area breweries:

Birdsong Brewing Co.: Wake Up Porter

ABV: 5.8%

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Coffee- and vanilla-infused Wake Up Porter is one of Birdsong’s oldest beers, developed in the original Optimist Park location that Birdsong vacated in 2015. The brewery originally named it No Quarter Porter in tribute to the Led Zeppelin song but learned about a Triangle-area brewery that used a similar name. The straightforward replacement wasn’t a handicap—Wake Up remains one of Birdsong’s bestselling seasonals, created in partnership with Central Coffee. Managing Partner Chris Goulet mentions 2017, when the brewery ran short of Wake Up because of a global vanilla shortage, “and I felt like I got yelled at every time I walked into the taproom.”

Lenny Boy Brewing Co.: Ground Up Coffee Stout

ABV: 5.3%

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Ground Up is typical of coffee beers, and it’s the flagship fall seasonal for Lenny Boy, which has brewed it for a decade in partnership with Counter Culture Coffee in Durham. Its reasonable alcohol content helps. “We wanted a sessionable coffee stout,” says co-founder Townes Mozer, “something where you could have a couple of them and you’re not, you know, off your rocker.” Unlike Lower Left, where Shoenthal cold-ages coffee beers with whole beans, and Birdsong, which adds cold brew after fermentation, Lenny Boy wraps a coarse grind in muslin and lets it sit in the fermented brew for 24 to 36 hours. Cold brew, Mozer says, would dilute an already low-ABV beer.

Replay Brewing: Java the Hutt Coffee Blonde

ABV: 5%

JT Tellier concedes that he and his wife, Leah, who opened arcade-themed Replay in Fort Mill, South Carolina, in 2021, are Star Wars nerds. Naming their coffee beer was almost too easy. The beer, though, is far lighter than the character. “The intention was that, if we brew this beer, the coffee is going to shine more,” Tellier says. “Something darker may have covered up some of those coffee notes with a heavier malt bill. So we wanted to stick with something a little lighter that allowed the coffee to be the star of the show instead of second fiddle to heavier beer.” Their supplier is Knowledge Perk, also based in Fort Mill, Tellier says: “We like to support local businesses whenever possible.”

GREG LACOUR is the editor.