When Upland Brewing and Revolution Brewing announced they would be teaming up for a collaboration called REVved UP, we jumped at the chance to tag along. For the past few months, we’ve be hanging out with brewery owners, brewers, roasters, sales reps, and other beer industry folk, to give a behind-the-scenes look at the collaboration process. At the end, we’ll throw a huge party where you can come taste REVved UP for yourself and hangout with the makers. Sign up for our EMAIL NEWSLETTER for an invitation.
Here’s where we are now: Upland will brew and bottle a blonde ale and Revolution will do the same with a brown ale. Both will use the same coffee from Chicago roasters, Dark Matter Coffee. Both will be called REVved UP. Today I’m at Dark Matter Coffee’s roasters (affectionally referred to as “The Mothership”) to learn more about the Chicago roaster and the coffee they’ll be contributing to the REVved UP collaboration. My hosts, Nicole (Quality Control) and Jake (Events & Promotions) are taking me through a “cupping” (more on that later) and filling me in on how things are done around here.
The Dark Matter Way: Natural Process Coffee
Dark Matter uses natural process coffees, which are beans that have undergone a high-fermentation process. Jake explains the distinction, “Natural process coffees dry with the fruit still covering it, which allows the sugars and natural yeast to develop wild acids. This presents itself in the coffee as a fruitier notes. So if you’ve ever had a coffee that was strawberry or blueberry notes, it was most likely a natural process coffee. It adds a nice sweetness to it.”
This is a practice that makes Dark Matter unique. “A lot of coffee companies didn’t want to use natural process coffees because it was seen as impure… it had a stigma to it” explains Nicole, “Some people call it an ‘Ethiopian process’ because it started in developing countries like Ethiopia. Basically, it requires less water. Normally when you’re stripping a coffee, it needs to go into these giant water-filled vats, so in places like Ethiopia where that’s not as plentiful a resource, they tend to use natural processes. There’s a lot of opinion and snobbery behind it but we really like it.”
Jake adds, “There are some coffee companies that would probably die if they caught us putting coffee in a barrel…stuff like that really upsets people.”
This is the kind of experimentation that draws the interest of breweries. It’s a similar ethos — one that says “we’re not going to settle for the way things have always been done, instead we’re going to experiment for the sake of flavor.”
My First Coffee Cupping
A cupping is the coffee equivalent of a sensory analysis panel. It’s essentially a specialized quality control method that coffee makers take part in regularly to maintain consistency. This is especially important for a roaster like Dark Matter that uses a less predictable natural process. Nicole explains, “We do cuppings twice a day, and it’s a specific way of drinking coffee to find defects or things that could be better. We score them and look at catalogues of all of our roasting specs to compare. It can also highlight what we do in the roasting process. If you’re tasting it on the table and it tastes like grass or asparagus, then we know the next time we roast this we’ll have to go a little darker with it.”
A cupping breaks down to three different portions: the dry smell, the steep, and the taste test. First, each cup is ground individually and placed in an unlabeled glass. The aroma is taken.
Next, water is poured over and the coffee steeps. The aroma is taken.
Then, after ten minutes, a series of quick sips are taken off of spoons of each sample. The goal is the see how the coffee’s flavors develop from start to finish.
One of the coffees we taste, Gesha is a pretty good summary of what Dark Matter is all about. “This is one of the more expensive coffees” explains Jake. “I’ve seen a pour over of Gesha at other places go for $15, and a bag for $70… and we sell it for $20. Our thought is, why should this great tasting coffee be so expensive and unattainable for people?”
To put that into perspective, this single tasting cup is five times more expensive than anything else on the table.
It’s a great summary of what makes Dark Matter so special. Their “coffee for the people” attitude means they do things like WAY undercharge on expensive coffees because they believe people should be able to have access to the best.
After the cupping I catch up with Aaron Campos, Dark Matter’s Director of Coffee for more information on where we are in the coffee selection process for REVved UP.
Aaron Campos: We sent a whole bunch of washed Guatemalan coffees to Upland…trying to get a feel for what they were looking for palate wise. They’ll send us back some notes and then we’ll use those to select the right coffee for the beer.
Lakeshore Beverage: When we left our last planning meeting, the idea was to experiment with Cascara, a coffee fruit. What happened with that experiment?
Aaron Campos: The cascara has been abandoned at this point. We’ll work on that at a different time. The one that we gave them was put through a wet pulper so there was a lot of water involved which washes off the muselage that makes cascara, cascara. So it was light and astringent. Another method would have been to go through dry pulpers which leaves that fuselage on and you’re left with at lot of sugary, pulpy stuff that gives the coffee a way bigger body, so much so that it’s almost syrupy or sweet. So the cascara that we have now isn’t right for the beer and we decided to try something else.
After the visit I gave Patrick Lynch, one of the Upland Brewing brewers a call to discuss his thoughts on the newest batch of Dark Matter samples.
Patrick Lynch: After the first meeting we went back with six samples and the cascara. We did some cold brews and ran them through our sensory analysis panels and there were two clear favorites. We told Dark Matter what those were and then tailored more blends based on our new requirements and sent four new samples to try.
Lakeshore Beverage: Why did you decide against using the Cascara coffee fruits?
Patrick Lynch: Ultimately, we decided we wanted more of a traditional coffee flavor. We made some tea samples with the Cascara but felt the subtle flavors would be lost in the finished beer and since we’re brewing a coffee blonde, we wanted to really showcase “coffee” flavor instead of focusing on the coffee fruits.
Lakeshore Beverage: What flavor profiles did you settle on in the coffee?
Patrick Lynch: We’re finding that we’re drawn towards coffees with citrus notes, distinct orange character, and some chocolate mixed in. Our top two choices were lighter roasts. People tend to have predetermined flavors in mind when they think of coffee beers, so we wanted to find something that fulfilled that but also had some nuanced citrus notes that gives them something unique.
In a few days, I’ll be heading down to Bloomington, Indiana for the official REVved UP brew day at Upland’s production brewery. Stay tuned.