But in the ten or more years of its existence, coffee beers have undergone a bit of a renaissance. While the porters and stouts that define this style have been tweaked, refined, and nearly perfected, others have branched out into new styles, techniques, and coffees to try and find new territory in the brew. And to accomplish this, many brewers have turned to coffee roasters for insight. Brethren in the dark arts of fermentation and brewing, roasters like Intelligentsia in Chicago have been collaborating with eminent brewers since some of the first barrel-aged beers were blended with coffee to create icons like Three Floyd's Dark Lord and Goose Island Bourbon County Coffee Stout.

A few months ago, I made a new friend in Stephen Morrissey of Intelligentsia. Over a few underwhelming beers, he opened up and admitted that most coffee beers leave him disappointed. "They're just fine" he said, in his waning Irish accent. Indeed, after ten years of experimentation, most coffee beers were still using coffee as a commodity ingredient. A beer either has coffee or it doesn't. Fewer still would point to extraction processes as the differentiator — cold brew vs hot, grounds vs beans, whirlpool vs bottling. While these debates are critically important, it seemed a bit like putting the cart before the horse. "What if you started with the coffee?" Stephen asked. "You can get dark fruits, bright citrus, earthy, vegetal, all manner of flavors and aromas from different origins. What if you made a beer to bring out the qualities of the coffee instead?"