just got, or, was given a bag of devotion coffee and am thinking of using it for a coffee chocolate stout. Anybody use it?
If this is the coffee you're talking about: https://www.devocion.com/ then I'm sure it will be fine in your stout. However, at $24+/lb, I think it might be overkill, price-wise. Assuming the taste justifies the price (doubtful for a Columbian), I'd be inclined to enjoy it in the cup where it belongs and use something less pretentious in your beer. Not that coffee selection is unimportant, but much of the nuance that differentiates a fine coffee would be all but lost in a beer. Just my 2 cents.
I tend to agree....drink the nice expensive coffee and use something cheaper for your beer. I doubt u will taste that much difference. Or do it... for science!
Well, seeing it was a gift, and from the price quoted a real nice gift, and they do like the beer I'm going to make, I'll use some " for science" then drink the rest as intended. Thanks.
It is good as straight coffee, the Hawian coffee I usually use is super in beer, not so hot my the mug
I guess I’m in the minority. I say use the best coffee you can get your hands on! I’ve used some of the dark matter single origin stuff (in the $25/lb. range) and it makes phenomenal beer. My opinion is that you shouldn’t skimp on coffee, fruit, and spices in brewing. Stouts are cheap beers to make anyway. I find lighter roasts, shorter contact time, and fresher beans (within 2-7 days of being roasted) are the best way to get good character. A brewer also turned me on to coffee blending recently. It makes a lot of sense. We don’t use one hop or one malt.
@JohnnyChicago yes, but I've had $50 per lb coffee from Hawaii that was not great in a mug but super in beer. Could be inflated price,but, it was another gift so drank some brewed some. I totally agree on the fruit and spices. Fresher and spot on harvesting is key!
Good point. This has been brought up in barrel-aging threads too. Great whiskey doesn’t necessarily yield a great barrel for aging beer in it. Great drinkin’ coffee won’t necessarily make great coffee beer... A lot of it is personal preference and recipe and technique dependent too.
Slightly off topic, but my girlfriend and I are coffee snobs (and I mean that slightly pejoratively towards myself ) and drink the $25/lb stuff daily. We keep notes on them all, and for me I usually make a note of those that have a flavor that would go well in a beer. I can't remember them all, but we had this bean from Heart Roasters recently and it was heavenly. The flavor notes of peach and lychee were pretty spot on, but I just know in a stout it would just come off as a generally fruity-in-the-way-coffee-can-be fruity coffee flavor that would balance the bitterness from the hops and roasted malt. Someday I'll find out...
speaking of blending. I have used coffee bean direct's "poor man's blend" in a porter, added as cold brew and it was quite good. I redid the brew with a honduras blend from a personal favorite roastery (Rook in NJ) and the coffee wasn't as pronounced - but this was most likely due to the strength or lack thereof in the cold brew. Poor man can be found for $7/pound in 5 pound packages on amazon. It's my go-to for making gallon batches of pretty concentrated cold brew. Doing a porter and dry beaning in a few weeks, debating about using Poor man or not, my package is a few months old at this point.
Definitely try it. It’s not like you’re throwing the whole 1 lb bag in. Pretty sure you can spare a few ounces.
I'm also of the opinion that a beer is only as good as it's ingredients. Yes, some beers are greater than the sum of their parts, but that's rare magic. Most of my off beers have resulted from using cheap or off ingredients.
That's a good point, but, in the case of coffee, some of the most exquisitely delicious coffees can be found for under $5/lb green, maybe $10 from a capable roaster. Indeed, even a 'Cup of Excellence' winner can frequently be found for well under $24/lb. I'm not saying that this is not an excellent coffee (I have no idea). I'm only saying that $24+/lb is probably 50% marketing. And very few homebrewers I know would go out of their way to overpay for ingredients. That said, anybody who uses K-cups is paying somewhere around $25 to $50/lb for pre-ground coffee. That's obscene, IMO. (It's also marketing genius!)
@mikehartigan, got any suggestions? I pay about twice the prices you are indicating, sometimes more, for my favorite coffees from George Howell or Intelligentsia. (I favor light-roasted African or Pacific beans.) The best one I've found at a lower price point was Colectivo's "Del Sol" blend, and even that is $14/pound. I am not in a position to roast beans myself, although if I found green beans that were good enough, I could get my brother-in-law to roast them for me. (I once bought him some beans from Hawaii, and the coffee was out of this world, but the beans were quite expensive. Here they are—$22/pound!) For what it's worth, my view is that given the amount of coffee you would typically use in a beer, it makes little sense to let price be a major consideration. If you prefer inexpensive coffees, or you think there's no difference, then great. But saving a buck or two on a five-gallon batch just shouldn't be enough of a priority to compromise on quality.
Costa Rica coffee taste like chocolate when warm. We have these k cups at work. My Columbian co-workers said it's better then coffee from their country. Green mountain sells good ones too. https://www.amazon.com/Van-Houtte-Coffee-Keurig-K-Cups/dp/B00C1L54XE#customerReviews https://www.amazon.com/Green-Mountain-Coffee-Paraiso-Single-serve/dp/B076WRV3RY?th=1 They also brought me this.Suppose to be their favorite there.
I buy most of my green beans here: http://www.greencoffeebuyingclub.com/ A few of the Columbians are a little pricey, but those are the exceptions. I haven't priced roasted beans in a few years, but I'd be surprised if they were selling for twice the price of green. As to 'compromising on quality' by buying cheaper beans, my point was that paying $24/lb for coffee beans that may or may not be marginally better than $10 beans makes no sense. I've found that, with coffee beans, the correlation between price and quality is loose, at best, particularly when even the seller doesn't use superlatives to describe them, as is the case here (sustainable farming, long term relationships with growers, and fair trade prices are all noble ends, but they say nothing about the quality of the beans, which is what we're discussing here. And those factors, no doubt, partly explain the seemingly high prices). I agree, cheaping out on an ingredient to save money at the expense of the final product is foolhardy. But paying more with no discernable benefit is equally senseless, IMO.
I agree $ doesn't dictate quality, I was speaking more to the "cheaper is better because nuance is lost" type comments. I must admit I love coffee, probably the same way a blue moon drinker loves beer. Gimme that peets dark roast for my daily coffee and intelegensia diablo for special occasions.
Yeah, you're right. I strayed a bit off my original point on that. But I still hold that much, if not all of the nuance of a fine coffee would be lost in a well crafted beer. Diminishing returns would likely diminish to near zero. Strictly from that perspective, I would be disinclined to use a fine and/or expensive coffee in beer. I'd prefer to drink it by itself where it can truly shine. Fortunately, since I roast my own beans, fine coffee is not terribly expensive Make up your mind! The only commercially brewed coffee that ever blew me away was one I was served at a newly opened Intelligensia many years ago - I could be wrong, but I believe it was the first location they opened in Chicago, so they were careful to make a splash.
