Two of my favorite things to cook and bake with are coffee and beer, so it’ll come as no surprise that a third favorite ingredient is coffee beer. With its flavors tending toward the richer end of the spectrum, it holds up beautifully to the heat of culinary experimentation, imparting elements of both roasted coffee and malt.
Though many recipes utilize beer, few specify coffee beer, so I’ve taken to switching it in where it seems like it might fit well and taste-testing the results (an arduous process, I assure you). Unsurprisingly, I’ve found several winners. Here are five of my favorite beer recipes to kick up a notch with coffee beer.
1. Stout BBQ Meat Ball Sliders (The Beeroness) || Beer recipe blog The Beeroness, run by Seattle-based Jackie Dodd, is one of my favorite places to turn for recipe inspiration. In fact, seeing recent publicity for Dodd’s new Craft Beer Bites cookbook was one of my impetuses for compiling this list. These meatball sliders utilize stout in both the meat mixture and the sriracha-infused barbecue sauce they’re topped with—for best results, substitute a strong coffee stout like Astoria, Oregon’s Fort George Coffee Girl Imperial Stout in both.
2. Beer-Braised Pot Roast (Sip Northwest‘s Culinary Chemistry) || As you may know, our own Margo Greenman writes a column on boozy cooking and baking, and I love trying her recipes with a coffee twist. In this pot roast write-up, Margo uses a lighter ISA to braise the meat, but I love how the caramelized meat flavors are augmented by the caramel taste of a coffee porter like Anubis Imperial Coffee Porter from Laughing Dog Brewing in Ponderay, Idaho.
3. Pumpkin Ale Beer Bread (Lemons for Lulu) || Beer bread is great no matter what brew you put in it, and this recipe is especially perfect this time of year. We’re just starting to see pumpkin ale hit the shelves and as the days cool down, baking becomes all the more tempting. This pumpkin ale beer bread recipe calls for one 12-ounce bottle of pumpkin beer—switch half of that out for a half-bottle of coffee beer like Seattle-based Two Beers Brewing Co.’s Cold Brew Coffee Brown Ale. The result is like the pumpkin spice latte of the bread world. And the best part? You’ve got two half-bottles of open beer that you’ll now just have to drink.
4. Beef, Bacon & Mushroom Pie with Dark Aussie Ale (What Katie Ate) || Nothing inspires me to try a new recipe like the photo that goes with it, and I love this food blog because the photography is truly spectacular. This scrumptious savory pie recipe comes all the way from Sydney, Australia—for a more Northwestern flavor, trade out the Coopers Dark Ale for Portland’s Lucky Labrador Stumptown Porter.
5. From-Scratch Cinnamon Rolls (Cooking & Beer) || I originally found this recipe in searching for blogs that focused on cooking with beer, and as it turned out, the actual recipe here was for cinnamon rolls that paired well with beer. Not to be deterred, I switched out the ¼ cup of water for ¼ cup of Magic Beans coffee beer from Brassneck Brewery in Vancouver Omit the sprinkles and pair the end result with a piping-hot cup of black coffee from Bows & Arrows in Victoria (the same “magic beans” that Brassneck uses).
