Laynes Espresso

Laynes Imperial

we’ve had to make a slight change to the original info release…it’s got more alcohol in than we thought.

Laynes Imperial, and Golden Gate (Launch Date: 4th Aug 2011)

This month we are launching two cask ales at The Brewery Tap. The first is Golden Gate, a 4.5% golden-brown ale made with crystal malt, and English and American hops. The beer is inspired by a musical scale of the same name.

The second is a collaboration between the Brewery Tap Brewhouse and the Baristas from Laynes Espresso next door. It is a 7.7% coffee beer called Laynes Imperial. This is a relatively “big” beer, with a gravity of 1011 and over 65 IBU. In other words there is lots of malt sugars still in the beer, balanced by a high level of hop bitterness. It also contains fresh La Pira coffee, all the way from Costa Rica. It is fermented with Leeds Brewery’s signature yeast strain.

This beer is not entirely sure what it is! It could have been a coffee IPA, but contains too much crystal malt to really be described as “pale.” It could have been a porter or an imperial stout, had it been brewed with dark roasted malts, but it was not. And it is too strong and hoppy to be merely a “bitter.” We therefore have something of a unique creation on our hands, and in very limited supply!

The first thing that hits you when you taste it is the hop character. La Pira is a tangy, citrussy coffee variety, so we chose to match it with Amarillo and Cascade. It also has a small amount of Pilgrim in it. The next thing you are likely to notice is the sweet caramel body, which is rich and heavy. The flavour of the coffee is only really apparent as an aftertaste, although you can pick up the aroma in the glass. But that distinctive character which you only get from La Pira , really blends with the malt, hops and yeast to create a new beer flavour that would not be possible without all of the components.

Laynes Imperial was made like any other all-grain, whole-hop beer. Only the coffee was added between the wort boiling stage and wort cooling stage, pre-fermentation. The week we brewed it, Dave Laynes had been experimenting with fine-tuning the espresso temperature that he uses for this particular variety of coffee. He was trying to emphasise that tangy quality that you get down the sides of your tongue when you drink espresso. And he was trying these experiements out on me! He decided to settle on a temperature around 92 degrees centigrade. So, after the hops had been boiled into the wort, we allowed it to cool to exactly 92 degrees. At this point, we submerged kilograms of fresh coffee into the wort. For this, Dave and Carl had made the decision to use a very coarse grind. And at Laynes they use their coffee within minutes of grinding it, or not at all. This principal was of course extended to the beer.

We wrapped the coffee in muslin, making sure there was none stuck to the outside of the bags. This was so we could remove the coffee after exactly 5mins, and none would remain inside to impart a harsh bitterness. Coffee floats, so we had to manually keep it submerged with metal implements. Not easy at 92 degrees! This method of brewing coffee is most similar to a cafetiere, as opposed to espresso/pour-over etc.

It was a fascinating and rewarding brew day for me. I learned how similar the coffee and beer brewing principals are. It is mostly the same parameters that we are both concered with: gravity, temparature, time, pressure. I also developed a respect for the dilligence of Baristas such as Dave and Carl from Laynes. The beer hits the bar Aug 4th, at Funk ‘n’ Ale, only at The Brewery Tap. Dave and Carl will be handing out samples of the actual coffee used during the launch, so you can compare it to the beer.