homebrewandbeer.com

... something with coffee.

many of my friends are coffee lovers, and with allot of my beer i want more i can impress my friends with. does coffee work in HB? does yeast have a bad reaction to caffeine or something else in coffee?

i want something that will have more then just a slight resemblance to coffee, i want to really be able to taste the stuff. any suggestions? what style of beer would this suite most? what kind of coffee should i use? i guess i should avoid instant coffee. could i boil coffee beans in with the wart or something?

Stout, for sure. As far as I know, using actual coffee in beer doesn't work all that well... Something about the more undesirable flavours coming out rather than the desirable ones (I've never done it myself so I'm just reporting what I've read filtered through my rather unreliable brain).

So, I think the best way to get those coffee flavours would be by using roasted grains, such as chocolate malt, black malt, and roasted barley.

I have a recipe database here, in which people seem to have used coffee. I've never done any of them though. One recipe from it:

id 158
brew Coffee Stout
category Stout
type Extract
fermentables 6 lb Stone Mountain Brewery amber malt syrup 3 lb Geordie light DME 1 lb crystal malt 10L 8 oz. chocolate malt 2 oz. roasted barley
hops 6 oz. Cascade hops (5.2% AA), bittering 1 oz. Cascade hops, flvaoring and aroma
comments
other 8 oz. Italian espresso beans
yeast 15 g. Windsor dried ale yeast
method Ground speciality malts and steeped in 1 1/2 gal. cold water. Brought water up to temp and held at 150 - 160 deg F for 1/2 hour. Added extracts, brought to boil and added bittering hops. Boiled for 1 hour. Added 1/2 oz. hops and ground coffee 10 minutes before end of boil, added 1/2 oz hops at end of boil. OG 1.070. Kegged 18 January 1996; FG 1.034 (estimated alcohol, 5.9% abv). Tapped keg 25 February 1996.

You can steep the beans with your grains. Don't boil though. And coffee works great! Especially in dark beers.

Maybe the caffine will give the yeast a full steam engery?

Try tin Thomas Coopers Irish Stout start off with, and you can learn to develop favours starting from there.

It's one of my favourite stout/tin/kit I have made so far.