Field Recordings x Darkwoods : Coffee Sour

Working with Dark Woods Coffee we have combined Colombia Pink Bourbon IPA Coffee Beans from Sebastian Ramirez, Coffee Farm El Placer with a beautiful balanced sour base. The flavours this beer is throwing are incredible, a real experience.

Super fresh, super clean, bright, zesty, and earthy. We cannot wait to share this beer with you, it’s truly special.

Consider this an evolution from our last Barrel Aged Imperial Stout. Our collaboration with Moersleutel. It was during the making of this beer we called in the help of Dark Woods Coffee to help us select the coffee best suited to be worked in the beer. Whilst working our way through those coffee’s Duncan [from Dark Woods] mentioned this weird and wonderful coffee that they had sourced.

Sebastian Ramirez El Placer’s Colombia Pink Bourbon IPA Coffee Beans.

El Pacer, owned by Sebastian Ramirez is a pioneering coffee farm situated at over 1700m in Calarca, Quindio, focusing on modern processing and big flavours. The coffee is unique in its production. Using a 200 hour carbonic ‘honey’ maceration with the addition of hops and beer yeast in order to extract the coffee bean from the cherry fruit. This process imparts flavours of pine, bramble, hops and mango to this special coffee.

Adding coffee into a dark beer would be the norm. Coffee and dark beers do historically work very well together. However, the feeling was that this coffee is so full of subtle nuances, that adding it into a bold, robust and roasty dark beer would pull away and distract from the coffee’s varied and delicate flavour spectrum. For this reason we chose to infuse the beer into a clean sour beer with a touch of lemon zest. We trialled various amounts of coffee vs various brewing times in the beer on a smaller scale, to find the perfect balance point between the coffee, base beer and lemon zest. The result is a highly complex beer. Smooth, slightly acidic, a touch sweet and rounded with a backdrop of fresh, light roast coffee. Red berry, mango, smooth chocolate and a drying tannin finish are elevated by the beer’s low carbonation, gentle sourness and zesty tones.

The coffee : Dark Woods Coffee first received a batch of this coffee in Spring 2022, helping them to win a stunning 3 Star Great Taste Award and a Deliciously Yorkshire Taste Award finalist nomination, before this lot arrived in October Lactic acid has been introduced during an extended fermentation to drive deeper, more complex flavours. This is a very floral, sugary coffee, with distinct rose scented notes.