Our collaboration with Bare Bottle challenged Lester to mimic the flavor of a Snowy Plover in a beer. And he nailed it!
It’s no secret that we at Andytown love coffee and beer. You can catch us after work at neighboring bars Seven Stills, White Cap, Riptide, or After Hours sipping on a pint. The day that I created the Snowy Plover, my husband Michael (who doesn't drink, but misses beer) loved it, saying “it’s like a sober person’s Guinness!”
So when Bare Bottle asked us to do a collaboration to make a beer that tastes just like a Snowy Plover, the obvious answer was “HECK YES!”
That’s when we met Lester Koga, Bare Bottle’s co-founder and coffee geek in residence. Lester was an avid home brewer before starting Bare Bottle. Now, Lester roasts all of the coffee Bare Bottle uses for their coffee beers (with the one, very notable exception of our collaboration.) We talked to Lester about our “Birds of a Feather” project and how his love of coffee and beer collide in the form of Bare Bottle’s many coffee beer offerings.
Lester roasting coffee for one of Bare Bottle’s many coffee beers.
ANDYTOWN: Hi Lester! Please introduce yourself and tell us how you ended up in the beer world.
LESTER KOGA: I grew up in Fresno and have lived in the Bay Area off/on for the last 20 years. Homebrewing started off as a hobby that my friend/ business partner (Mike Seitz) got me into back in 2007. We went from homebrewing with kits to partial mash (mix of kits + whole grains) to all-grain brewing, the latter of which is essentially what we do now on the big scale. It started off as something we did on the weekends, but the more we dove down the rabbit hole, the more we realized we spent more time thinking about making beer than we did for our day jobs, so we had to make a change. Together with our friend, Ben Sterling, we kicked around business plan after business plan until we felt confident that what we were building was meaningful and unique. 5 years ago, we opened our doors and hoped that 'if we built it, they will come' and luckily for us, they did.
Pouring the Shore Leave Hook blend into the fermenter at Bare Bottle.
A: Aside from brewing beer, you also love coffee! What got you interested in roasting coffee?
L: Once you start making beer and really getting into the science of it, you open up your mind (and mouth) to making other things as well. I've always liked coffee and appreciated the localness of it. With so many great coffee shops and roasters (particularly in the Bay Area), it's hard not to get inspired by what other people are doing around you. When we first opened Barebottle, we were only open in the late afternoon/ evenings. As demand grew, we started to open a few hours earlier, which led us to realize that some people used the brewery as a workspace. At that point, we figured we needed to offer something other than beer and coffee was the obvious option.
We take a lot of pride in crafting all the drinks we serve (beer, wine, kombucha, natural sodas), so before we could start serving coffee, we had to figure out how to roast it. A buddy of mine, Christian Ritter (Noe Valley Coffee), set me up with a bunch of books from Scott Rao to start and invited me to roast with him at the CoRo in Berkeley. I subsequently took a couple of classes at the CoRo and have been roasting there for the last 3 years. They are really great people and the days I roast are always some of my favorites. Just like beer, there's so much quantitative data captured in each roast, and it's a lot of fun to combine the sensory details of each cup with the data logs. Each new bean presents a challenge to find the right profile and that's ultimately our job - to help that bean find the best expression of itself.
A. How do beer brewers usually combine beer and coffee?
L: Most brewers either make cold brew coffee and add it to the beer before packaging or add coarse ground beans during fermentation.
A. How does Barebottle approach beer/coffee combos? What makes your coffee beers so different?
L: Having an inventory of fresh beans on hand and being able to roast whatever/ whenever we want, affords us a lot of room for experimentation. We've tried the more traditional methods mentioned earlier many times over, but we've settled on using a whole bean steep method. Several years ago, we wanted to make a cream ale with coffee and we were faced with the challenge of adding coffee flavor, without adding color (the beer was pale gold in appearance). We ran a bunch of small experiments using cold brew, hot brew, ground coffee and ultimately settled on just throwing the whole bean into the fermenter to steep.
Lester pulls a sample of the “Birds of a Feather” beer to taste before adding the coffee.
The process took me back to years earlier when I was backpacking near Lake Shasta and popped into a small brewery. They made a really good coffee Porter (dark ale), made with an in-town coffee roaster and I thought the expression of the beans shined through. The brewer mentioned they added the whole bean to the beer, so it wasn't a far fetched idea to try the same. Once we added the whole beans into the fermenter, we noticed the coffee aromas and flavors were more intense, similar to opening a fresh bag of coffee. It's very different from the character of a brewed cup of coffee and critically for the beer we were brewing, there was no color extraction from the coffee beans. We've used this method ever since, but still tinker with adding ground beans for darker beers.
A: Tell us about Birds of a Feather—The Snowy Plover inspired beer! How did you make this beer taste just like a Snowy Plover?
L: When the opportunity arose to work with Andytown, brewing a beer inspired by the Snowy Plover was high on my list. The Snowy Plover is one of those iconic SF drinks that hits all the right notes. The intense espresso, that viscous, not-to-sweet whipped cream and the simple sugar are so perfectly balanced, plus I'm a firm believer that everything is better with carbonation. To re-create this drink, we started with the coffee - Andytown's Shore Leave Hook. Working backwards from there, we knew one of the hardest parts would be nailing the richness, sweetness and body of the Snowy Plover.
I had the honor of pouring the hops into our “Birds of a Feather” beer early on in the brewing process.
To do this, we used the following malted barleys: Maris Otter, Munich, Crystal 45 and Crystal 60. Maris Otter is the predominant malt (from England) and creates a nicely bready base. Munich adds a crackery, crustiness, while the two Crystal malts add body, sweetness and caramel flavors. We used a higher mash conversion temperature than a typical ale (157 degrees), to further increase the body and added Demerara sugar for the last dimension of rounded sweetness. East Kent Golding hops (a traditional English noble varietal) were added in the boil for bitterness and a slightly floral flavor. After fermentation was complete, we added the Andytown coffee beans (whole bean) and steeped for 2 days. Finally, we added a touch of vanilla to mimic the whipped cream and pull all the flavors together.
A: Where can we enjoy Barebottle beer? Anyway we can follow you on social media?
L: We've got two taprooms: in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco and in the Santa Clara Square Center in Santa Clara. However, we're also in many of the great bars, restaurants and bottle shops throughout the Bay Area. You can follow us on Instagram @barebottle