Texans Are Making Coffee with Beer

Welcome back to our column, Nomadic Brews, from gypsy brewer Jeppe Jarnit-Bjergsø of Evil Twin Brewery. Each month, we check in with dispatches from Jeppe's travels around the world as he brews tasty stuff in places like Mexico, Taiwan, and Brazil.

Everything's bigger in Texas, and their growing beer demand is king.

Lately, I've been asking myself: Maybe we should open a brewery in Texas? But it's not that easy. I have heard that the registry for breweries is a two-year waiting list. You can't put all your money on something that is going to happen two years from now. I certainly don't want to. It's not a sustainable business model. The owner of Austin Beer Works had around the same amount of sales as Evil Twin last year, and he only sold his brews in Austin. We're worldwide. That's insane.

Even though I've temporarily given up hope on opening a brewery in the Lonestar State, there's one in particular that I've wanted to gypsy brew with forever: Jester King, located in the hill country outside of Austin. I've known the guys there for a long time since they started in 2010. I've wanted to create a unique beer with them because I think what they do is truly unique and so different from my approach. Jeff Stuffings started it with his brother, Michael, who currently lives inside the brewery; as in upstairs in the attic. They're very special dudes who have their own way of doing things. They sound very Texan when they speak, and I love being around them.

Jester King made their initial mark on the craft beer scene with their Belgian-style ales by using different yeast strains, but have become known for working with a lot of wild yeast. These days, they use their own house yeast, a blend of a bunch of strains they've used over time. I can never do that as a gypsy brewer; I can't bring in a wild yeast strain into a brewery, let alone across the world.

Last year, we decided to finally collaborate. Within a few weeks, I hopped a plane and entered into their Southern labyrinth: a Texan farmhouse—where things take time and there's no hurry—and melded it with mine, which involves running around the world brewing beer and then writing about it for MUNCHIES.

The brewery exists inside an old farmhouse barn that was purchased for $5,000 and shipped to Texas. The architectural bones of the brewery are a rustic setup that requires everything to be very hands-on.

On average, they're producing around 1,000 barrels of beer per year. There's no way that can make you a lot of money off of that, but I don't think that they care. Why should they? Their lifestyle and products are some of the best I've come across anywhere in the world, and it shows in their efforts. They're very hardcore people who are very determined to do exactly what they want to do.

There is nothing fake about what Jester King does. And Ron Extract, one of the owners, is also busy spending a lot of time working to help change Texas beer laws across the state.

For an average beer, it normally takes eight to ten days to ferment. Heat affects fermentation and at Jester King—which produces brews in a place where 100° Fahrenheit is a normal summer temperature—their strains are greatly affected. In the colder months, it can take them half a year to ferment a beer, which is insane. But that's at the heart of their ethos: they're hardcore beer makers who are very determined to do exactly what and how they want to do something. I admire them a lot.

I'm a huge coffee geek and so is everyone at Jester King. Naturally, we got into a rabbit hole discussion about coffee and realized that we needed to bring the world's current caffeine craze into our beer collaboration. As I started talking more about it with Jeff and the other guys, I mentioned a Kieni roast from Coffee Collective in Copenhagen—the best coffee I've ever consumed. We started riffing about how to mimic the flavors of the coffee in a beer. I read off the flavor descriptions from the bag and thought, Wouldn't it be fun to see if we can make this beer taste like that coffee? Obviously, it's nearly impossible to make a beer that tastes exactly like java, but we could definitely attempt to recreate some of the flavors from the descriptions on the side of the coffee bag.

Yes, there are a lot of coffee beers out there, but this was going to be our new take on brewing a coffee beer. We added blueberries because there are a lot of blueberry notes in the coffee, and blueberries also help to pull out earthy flavors in hops.

When you normally make a coffee beer, you would create a porter or stout and add coffee. The malt that you use to make either of these has a lot of flavor similarities to a cup of joe. You roast them at the same degrees, so it makes a lot of sense to blend them together. Some people out there are also making coffee IPAs, but that's not really my thing. According to experts like Coffee Collective, you should only heat your hot water to around 195° Fahrenheit/92° Celsius or whatever, in order to tease out the best flavors. In the past, I've made a beer in which we added the coffee beans at the end of the boil to imitate the real way of brewing coffee. But other beer makers do cold extracts and add the coffee after fermentation if they're going for a really clean, straightforward flavor. You can also throw brewed coffee into the beer at the end, which I've done before. There are many ways you can do it.

When we had the final product, we decided to have a tasting at a coffee shop in Austin. We took three beers and paired them with three coffees. It was crazy; there was one point at which we were like, "Holy shit! Is this beer or is this coffee?" Luckily, the results went in the same direction both in flavor and acidity. It was just awesome.

Most of the people who came to the tasting were bearded men between their early 20s and 30s. A lot of bros. I've noticed that the whole craft beer scene is moving more towards the bro scene. We used to just be a group of nerds. I think a lot of the bros care more about getting the beer because it's difficult to source than actually drinking it. Maybe they'll sell it on eBay.

When it came time to come up with a name for the final product, only one stuck: "World's Worst Twin," an idea from Josh, Jester King's label designer. He cautiously emailed me about the name because he wasn't sure if I would be offended. The email began with a polite, "I had this idea and I understand if you don't like it, but I think it's kind of cool, but be honest." My response involved something along the lines of "This is awesome." Nothing makes more sense than pouring our coffee beer into a coffee cup, so they slapped a logo of my face on the ceramic mug and there you have it.

And I'm not sure what makes the world's worst twin, but it's obviously me.