In coffee drink genealogy, coffee vigourous is like a good good good good grandfather. Big-bodied and full of toasty and chocolaty flavors, a good vigourous is means to mount adult to whatever records a “bittering agent” brings to a table. Well, coffee and drink have both grown adult given a ended days when vigourous was all there was, though still—the classics have a place in a hearts here during Sprudge. Which is because we now move we a Big Bad Baptist, a whiskey barrel-aged majestic vigourous by Epic Brewing.
Part of a Salt Lake City around Denver brewery’s Exponential Series, a Big Bad Baptist is a anniversary recover that utilizes coffee from a accumulation of opposite roasters—depending on where we are in a country, your internal Big Bad Baptist might be done with coffee from Blue Copper Roasters, Dark Horse Coffee, Novo Coffee, or one of 9 others. Being from Texas, my informal chronicle utilizes Dallas’ Cultivar Coffee Roasters, that only so happens to be one of my go-to shops in a Metroplex.
This is Cultivar’s third year of partnership on a Big Bad Baptist, that always facilities their Finca Malacara, a cleared Red Bourbon from El Salvador. But Cultivar co-owner Jonathan Meadows tells me this year is a bit different.
“This is a initial year we went with a lighter roast,” Meadows says. “Previous years, [the coffee] has been some-more developed, roughly to second crack.”
This year a fry form is identical to that of Cultivar’s prolongation batches of Finca Malacara—the ones you’d find during coffee shops all around Dallas.
With a lighter profile, a coffee imparts some-more than only a coffee-ness to a beer—instead, it loans flavors we would design to find in cups of a coffee on a own. Notes of caramel and chocolate give a Finca Malacara a participation in a boozy, high ABV Big Baptist—13 percent in a Cultivar version—but one that meshes good with a cocoa nibs used in a beer’s aging process.
The Big Bad Baptist is all people have come to know and adore from this character of beer. It’s a large beer, black and motor-oil-thick, and pours with a tan conduct that dissipates rather quickly. Sugary brilliance pervades throughout, and underscores records of vanilla, molasses, caramel, and chocolate, with a touch-of-heat finish due to a whiskey tub aging. The coffee is many benefaction mid-palate, though lingers until a whiskey starts to dominate.
Epic’s Big Bad Baptist isn’t unequivocally perplexing to forge new belligerent on how coffee and drink can commingle. It is an countenance of an comparison though still desired coffee drink tradition, seen by a complicated lens. Beyond a season notes, a Big Bad Baptist keeps total my favorite partial of this character of beer—thanks to a high ABV, it’s a drink best common with friends.
Zac Cadwalader is a news editor during Sprudge Media Network. Read some-more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
