#kompaan

388 Badgast de Kompaan.

Brassée à La Hague, cette blanche de style américain est agréable.

WARM WATER:

Abv: 6%

Served: Off the shelf

Aroma: Roast malt, coffee, soil, nuts

Pour: Ruby black with a finger of tan froth

Taste: Dry, roast coffee with rich, warm chocolate notes melting into a mildly bitter bite at the finish. This is a beautiful, dark and warm beer. There’s a magical burnt flavour that breaks down through roasted tones to chocolate bitterness. Exquisite.

FREAK:

The region of Kaffa in Ethiopia is suspected to be where coffee drinking began in the 10th century although documented evidence exists only as far back as the 16th century. Before that it’s all myths and legends. It soon spread to the Arabic world though and their word for it, qahwah, refers to its dark color. The Turkish appropriation is kahve and it was from Turkish importers that the Dutch bastardised kahve to koffie around 1582. A nice piece of trivia to introduce this particular beer with as it involves collaboration between the Irish Brown Paper Bag Project and Dutch craft brewers Kompaan. Jasper Langbroek and Jeroen van Ditmarsch met Colin Hession and Brian Short at a Berlin beer festival and hit it off to the extent that they met up again to brew this Black Coffee IPA. It’s brewed with 3 different malts, 5 different hops, and the finest Kenya Kiri Peaberry coffee, selected and roasted by 3FE. It’s a celebratory brew, marking friendship and shared love of beer and coffee.

What is it about coffee that has made it so culturally pervasive? From those middle east beginnings to today’s urban landscape of costabuck corners it represents something crucial to living life, shared respites, recuperations and chats. Cups of black stimulation built into the fabric of our days, we have embedded it into our shared experiences. Take for example Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks At The Diner from 1942:

Late night NYC, empty streets and three figures sit silent, smoking with coffee supped and inner thinking, sharing nothing but the watchful eyes of the waiter and the black, bitter taste of lonely hours spent together but apart. Nighthawks At The Diner is also the name of a 1975 live album by Tom Waits who, early on, used a beatnik image and aesthetic shtick to present his music and lyrical art of the romances, dramas and tragedies of human life. The beats, in the 40′s in NYC, drank coffee laced with Benzedrine to escape those things in search of the ultimate goof. Waits searched for and used the goof, particularly in interviews, like a zen samurai cutting through entertainment pomp to get to some comical kernel of existential truth that most interviewers grinned off like confused bananafish.

That has nothing to do with coffee I know but 28 years after Nighthawks At The Diner Waits appeared in Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee And Cigarettes film. A series of vignettes starring folk like Roberto Benigni, Cate Blanchett, RZA and GZA from Wu Tang Clan, Bill Murray, Steve Buscemi and the wonderful Alfred Molina. It is an homage to the social crux that is a shared pot of caffeine rich, roasted and brewed coffee and the gateway it can be to observation, postulation and hypothesis on a myriad of concerns. Waits appears with Iggy Pop almost parodying his Frank’s Wild Years character with hints at roadside medical procedures that has an unsettled Iggy searching for conversation changers.

David Lynch is another film maker who has been quite explicit about his love of good coffee. So much so in fact that he brought out his own brand: David Lynch Coffee

Quentin Tarantino has referenced and reverenced a good cup of joe in his films too:

“ Mmmm! Goddamn, Jimmie! This is some serious gourmet shit! Usually, me and Vince would be happy with some freeze-dried Taster's Choice right, but he springs this serious GOURMET shit on us! What flavor is this?”

In his most recent venture, Hateful 8, coffee is practically a secondary character reminding me of novels like Butcher’s Crossing and Blood Meridian where the brewing of coffee becomes seemingly crucial to the survival of the main characters!

Someone should write a thesis on the history of coffee in film.

Brew review on a collaboration beer from Brown Paper Bag Project, Kompaan Bier, & 3FE. An outstanding Black Coffee IPA which packs a huge amount of bitter roasted espresso notes with a hint of dark bitter chocolate. A breakfast beer...

Brown Paper Bag Project - http://www.brownpaperbagproject.com/ Kompaan Bier - http://www.kompaanbier.nl/ 3FE - https://www.3fe.com/