Tinker Coffee & Scarlet Lane collaborate on a different kind of brew

20 Jan Tinker Coffee & Scarlet Lane collaborate on a different kind of brew

Posted at 18:45h in Indiana Beer News, Scarlet Lane Brewing Co, Tinker Coffee, Uncategorized by Justin Knepp 0 Comments

By Adam T. Schick for Indiana On Tap

Here at Indiana On Tap we pretty much keep to talking about beer, so stick with me while I talk about coffee a bit. Coffee and craft beer culture are remarkably similar. Both are going through a craft renaissance, with local roasters popping up more and more across America. According to the National Coffee Association, 34% of coffee drinkers drank artisan coffee daily in 2014, an increase of 3% from the year before. The process behind making great coffee is largely different from great beer, but the attention paid to detail is very similar. And coffee roasters and craft brewers kind of look alike. You could swap them all and we probably wouldn’t notice.

I’ve been a coffee drinker since high school and have always prefered it black. I knew that beans from different parts of the world gave coffee different flavors, but that was about the extent of my knowlegde. I can tell you what good coffee is, though, and TInker Coffee’s Tiberius Hopped Sumatra coffee is DAMN good.

Hopped coffee? That’s right, friends. Before packaging the Sumatran beans in this coffee, TInker Coffee, located at 16th and Alabama just north of downtown Indy, aged these beans in Horizon hops provided to them by Scarlet Lane Brewing Co. The beans aged unroasted on the hops for two weeks to start, then another four days after roasting. They give off a very dank and floral smell, almost stronger than any hop I’ve ever smelled.

Rick Burkhardt and I had the pleasure of meeting with Steve Hall and Jeff Johnson of Tinker Coffee and Nick Servies and Doug Sheets from Scarlet Lane to talk over about their collaboration, how it came to be, and most importantly try the coffee and the brewery’s new IPA, also dubbed Tiberius.

“We got to talking at Coffee, Beer & Donuts this past year about trying something together,” Servies told me, “because coffee and beer are such natural fits.”

Hall followed that with, “But we wondered what else could we do? What else besides stouts and normal coffee beers?”

That thought led them to the reversal of the normal collaboration. Instead of adding coffee to a beer like you normally see, they’d be adding hops to coffee. Scarlet Lane was in the process of making Tiberius Centurion IPA and we more than happy to donate some Horizon hops to the project.

Servies says of the hop choice, “we knew we needed a very dank and floral hop to match the beans, so we knew Horizon was the right choice.”

Johnson brewed each of us a cup of the coffee (using a burr grinder. It is important that you use a burr grinder) for us to sample. What resulted was one of the best, most complex cups of coffee I’ve ever had the pleasure of tasting. That dank (I keep saying that word, but really – this cup smelled exactly like marijuana), floral aroma was irresistable, and the flavor only opened up as the coffee cooled more.
And what about the beer? Servies definitely didn’t leave us hanging, bringing a bomber to split. The beer has some of the similar qualities of the coffee, and is very fruity with a creamy mouthfeel. The banana flavor expands in your mouth as you drink more, but at 8% and 100 IBUs, you’ll need to be careful there.

Tinker Coffee only made 130 bags of this coffee and it could even be gone by the time of writing, but Hall says fret not: “We can’t wait to keep working with Scarlet Lane.”

I can’t either.