The non-alcoholic beer market has ballooned over the past three years. But for all the crushable lagers, pilsners, pale ales and XPAs that have proliferated in bottles and cans, alcohol-free dark beers remain relatively rare. UK-owned, locally brewed Big Drop makes a decent one, as do Melbourne’s Hop Nation and Upflow breweries. And of course Sobah, the first non-alcoholic brewery in the country, with its Aniseed Myrtle Stout.
Now Heaps Normal has joined the party with the Coffee Run Stout, a limited-edition beer infused with coffee from Newcastle’s Floozy Coffee Roasters. Each can contains about 20 per cent of the caffeine found in a shot of espresso.
“The Coffee Run Stout is a lighthearted play on combining two of our favourite drinking occasions – late night beers and early morning coffees,” says Andy Miller, Heaps Normal’s co-founder and CEO. “Let’s face it, sometimes these moments can bleed into one another. So we put them in a can.”
As brewers have tested the limits of creativity over the past few decades, we’ve seen all manner of doughnut, pancake, dessert, pastry, cereal and breakfast stouts – most of them overly sweet, cloying and imbalanced. Despite the syrupy campaign imagery, this latest release from Heaps Normal is nothing like that. (If you know the brand, you know how much it cares about drinkability.)
Au contraire – this is a real contender for most balanced and convincing non-alcoholic stout in the country. It drinks with all the classic roast-y, chocolatey flavours you’d expect, and only the slightest hint of coffee after swallowing. Oats fill out the mouth and very nearly make up for the lack of ethanol’s familiar punch. And it’s rather dry – a surprise given how many non-alc beers use non-fermentable sugars such as lactose and maltodextrin to improve palatability.
Coffee Run Stout is $16.99 a four-pack or $74.99 a slab. Pick up the former at one the locations below.
NSW
The Union Newtown
The Ship Inn Newcastle
Liquor Emporuim
Porter Balgowlah
QLD
The Triffid Brisbane
Saccharomyces Beer Cafe South Brisbane
Black Sheep Bottle Shops and My Beer Dealer
Suffolk Park Cellars
Sunrise Cellars
ACT
Ainslie Cellars
Blackhearts & Sparrows
SA
Duke of Brunswick, Adelaide
Ed Cellars
Vic
Carringbush Hotel
Beermash
Bottlehouse
McCoppins
Wholefoods
Tas
Hill St Grocer, South Hobart
Society Salamanca, Hobart
