Last Christmas, my extended relatives decided to gift me a few deliveries of The Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club. Opening these mail packages felt like a relic of a different era when getting craft beer required more effort and planning. It can be a fun gift to give to the beer fan in your life when they’ve had everything at the supermarket. I’ve received beers from breweries in New York, Pennsylvania, and Iowa that I never heard about before, but the best beer to come from these shipments was Mt. Carmel Brewing Company’s Coffee Brown.

In my experience brewing with coffee, you have to treat the ingredient like a variety of hops. Every type of coffee bean based on it’s origin or intensity of the roast gives off unique flavors that can greatly affect your beer. It’s what separates a Breakfast Blend versus a Guatemala Single Origin. Brazilian Coffee would cater best to brown ales as they naturally have nutty, chocolatey undertones and they keep these flavors well through cold-brewing. Depending on how the brewery infused the coffee in the beer matters, but the fact that they worked with their local roaster Deeper Roots Coffee shows they are dedicated to flavor.

Mt Carmel Brewing Company’s Brown Ale billows with a frothy, foggy head atop a chestnut mountain of a body. Coffee, unsurprisingly, echoes all throughout this beer seeping into each individual grain. Whatever the blend of coffee was used here, it was definitely given a malt/hop profile to match as the sweetness is at absolute equilibrium.

This beers runs through the gamut of all the wonderful ways I enjoy coffee from an affogato to a gelato. The write-up mentions there’s a taste of maple syrup which adds a surprisingly pleasant touch of sugar to the beer. Coffee Brown has an easy body and mouthfeel which reminds me a lot of homemade cold brew where you can get all the flavor without any of the typical acridity. I don’t think craft brewers are afraid of trying coffee beers but this goes in a new direction of how you can elevate brown ales.

Coffee Brown is apart of the brewery’s Snapshot Series meaning that it only comes back upon demand. Mt. Carmel, if you are reading this, I implore you to bring back this delicious beer. If I had the fortune of experiencing Coffee Brown in a beer-of-the-month club, I can’t imagine how Ohioans are ecstatic every time you release this beer.

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