Espresso made its debut in Italy in the early 20th century although coffee was already very much a part of Italian life for centuries. Espresso lovers owe their thanks for the tasty brew to Italy’s Luigi Bezzera, the owner of a manufacturing plant who wanted to speed up the time it took to make coffee. He discovered that adding steam pressure to the process produced a stronger, more robust cup of coffee. This machine used in this new quick-brew process was named the Fast Coffee Machine. The beverage produced by the machine would eventually become known as espresso, which means fast in Italian. Today is National Espresso Day. Logically, Peaks & Pints presents Peaks and Pints Beer Flight: Espresso Day.
Peaks and Pints Beer Flight: Espresso Day
Triceratops RevMo Caramel Coffee Stout
4.7% ABV
Homebrewer Rob Horn left New Jersey to become a firefighter at Joint Base Lewis-McChord. He and his wife, Kelly, opened Triceratops Brewing in August of 2014. With the last name Horn and three awesome kids, is there really any other name? At first, they brewed out of their home garage. After thriving there for three years they opened a tasting room next to Matchless Brewing in Tumwater. Their RevMo Caramel Coffee Stout, a collaboration with RevMo Choppers & Coffee in Olympia, and grabbed a bronze at the 2023 Washington Beer Awards, is a smooth and sweet coffee stout.
Black Raven Gunpowder Plot Nitro
6.9% ABV
This annual release nitro porter celebrates the thwarting of Guy Fawkes and his band of anti-heroes’ insidious plot to blow up the House of Lords with barrels of gunpowder Nov. 5, 1605. Black Raven soaked Anchorhead Coffee Roasters beans in top shelf bourbon and cellared the whole shebang on criminal amounts of cocoa nibs. Chocolate, oak, vanilla, coffee, and caramel toffee blows up the flavors. It’s a heavy body and nitro smooth, with a bitter coffee finish.
Eredita The Barn Owl
10.5% ABV
Chris Papallo began homebrewing in 2013 after receiving a Heady Topper “clone” as a Christmas gift from his wife. After falling in love with brewing, Papallo took a course on small batch brewing at Sterling College. He became a brewer and cellarman at Twelve Percent Beer Project from October 19 to June 2020, and then became the assistant brewer at Hill Farmstead Brewery from June 2020 to August 2022 before opening Eredità Beer in North Haven, Connecticut, at the state-of-the-art facilities at Twelve Percent. Switch out your iced vanilla latte for this for Eredità’s The Barn Owl imperial coffee stout brewed with dark and roasted malts, milk sugar, espresso sourced from Brazil, Costa Rica, and Guatemala, and vanilla beans sourced from Papua New Guinea.
Põhjala Cocobänger
12.5% ABV
Põhjala Brewery’s Cocobänger is a banging Imperial stout brewed with coconut and a Caturra coffee from Costa Rica. Expect a creamy, dessert-like coconut followed by a rush of Turkish coffee — earthy, tarry, balanced by the taste of plums and blackberry. As the beer warms, chocolate notes start to shine, with hints of caramelized sugar layering on top of the roasted coffee. Finally, the oiliness of the coconut and the smooth coffee crash down the tongue, lingering and leaving their seductive taste until the inevitable next sip.
AleSmith Speedway Stout: Toasted Coconut Vietnamese Coffee Edition
12% ABV
Brewed for the 2024 AleSmith Brewing‘ Speedway Grand Prix, their signature coffee imperial stout is brewed with toasted coconut and Vietnamese coffee.
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