Cup of Coffee – A Collaboration
Left Field Brew Day
Several months ago, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Left Field brewer Alex and sales rep Barry to discuss a Left Field and C’est What collaboration brew. After weighing a number of options, we decided that a dark, malty brew would be a perfect beer for fall. We chose C’est What’s coffee porter as our base recipe and collaborated with Alex on recipe development. The beer was brewed using Left Field ingredients with coffee from Everyday Gourmet at St. Lawrence Market.
A Bit About Alex & 10hL Brews
Alex has been brewing beer at Left Field for 5 years. His favourite beer to brew – and to drink – is a lager, though his passion for brewing extends to a wide range of beer styles. When I asked what was on deck for his next freestyle brew, he said he would love to revisit a classic German hefeweizen.
Left Field’s Liberty Village location is equipped with a 10-hectolitre brew tank, which is sometimes used to make smaller batches of mainstay brews that are being served in house. Most often, this smaller system is used as a pilot system to trial new beers, for one-offs and super fun collaboration brews.
Our Brew Day
For years, Barry has been my ambassador to Left Field. He’s kind, funny, and will work tirelessly to ensure the happiness of everyone around him. We were welcomed warmly by Barry and the Left Field crew, with coffee and snacks, from not one, but two different coffee shops.
Alex began the brew a couple hours prior to our arrival, explaining that he wanted to get some of the noisy, messy work out of the way. He started by sending the malted grains through the grist mill to make the starches more readily accessible. The grist was then combined with hot water in the 10-hectolitre tank, creating the sweet liquid wort through the conversion of starch into fermentable sugars.
We arrived at the brewery to the warm and sweet malt aromas from the mashing phase. After the wort was finished, we were able to help with the lautering phase, a filtration phase where the liquids are separated from the solids. The spent grain was separated out from the mash tun to the lauter tun, roughly the size and shape of a pizza oven.
We shovelled spent grain, filling 4 large recycling bins, before wheeling them for several minutes through the labyrinthian passages, as if on a brewhouse version of The Amazing Race. It was pretty great, though probably a lot less thrilling for Alex, who makes all 4 trips on his own as a routine part of his brew day.
After lautering, the wort was boiled and hops were added. It was then passed through a heat exchanger to bring it down to fermentation temperature, before being piped into a separate room housing the fermentation tanks. I was given the honor of pitching the yeast—at the insistence of my co-worker Jon, who jokingly suggested we name the beer “Leah’s First Pitch.”
Our collaboration brew is currently conditioning, and will be available for our cask event at C’est What on October 25th. We will have several exciting variations of this beer that will be available at both Left Field and C’est What.
Cup of Coffee
We’ve named our beer “Cup of Coffee”, a nod to the baseball term for a minor league player who has come up to play in the majors, though for a stint so brief he barely had time to enjoy a cup of coffee. We figured it would be fitting name to honor our brief, but wonderful single-day collab.
And…. just in case you felt like you were missing out on the beer history portion of this article, here’s a bit of history about C’est What’s Coffee Porter.
History of C’est What’s Signature Brew
In the 1980s and 90s, Ontario saw the proliferation of many brew your own beer shops – a more affordable alternative to The Beer Store, as it provided an option to brew a variety of beer styles that extended beyond a handful of bland lagers. The brew your own model gave C’est What the opportunity to experiment with brewing overlooked and relatively unexplored beer styles, without dedicating valuable restaurant space to house a bunch of brewing equipment.
C’est What’s brewing journey began at Toronto’s Select Brewing, a brew your own set up as malt extract brewery, a concentrated form of malted barley often used as a short-cut for home brewers. With the help of Select’s owners, a mash tun was constructed from spare parts, allowing C’est What to access the superior full grain flavour by producing their own wort from malted barley.
From there, the wort was transferred into 50L plastic carboys, transported back to C’est What in style – that is to say, crammed in to the back of a Nissan Sentra. Back at the bar, the yeast was pitched and the rest of the brewing process was carried out on an improvised system set up at C’est What.
Coffee porter was born from these jury-rigged experiments. It was later contract brewed by Al Moore (the Al in Al’s Cask Ale) at Trafalgar Brewing, and sold in 625mL bottles at the LCBO. Coffee porter was C’est What’s first signature brew.
(Leah is a Toronto based freelance writer as well as the Beer Boss and a server at C’est What)