Used Coffee Grounds Are The Unexpected Secret To Better Home Brews

When the lockdown occurred, many people turned to the internet for ideas on how to entertain themselves. Some took up sourdough making, some learned to dance, and others discovered home brewing. In the years since, home brewers have come up with plenty of wacky ideas for new flavor profiles and unusual ingredients to use to create interesting-tasting beers, from beer flavored with birch branches to oyster stout beer and brews reminiscent of peanut butter and jelly. So given this wide range of modern beer flavors, it's not entirely uncommon to picture a coffee-tasting beer. But did you know that you don't have to buy special ingredients to bring this creation to life?

On a deep dive into 10 of the best uses for your used coffee grounds, we discovered that it's possible (and encouraged!) to use coffee grounds in your home-brewing experiments for a rich, smooth beer that's sure to pack a punch. As the flavors are fair complements to one another, you'll often hear home brewers argue that medium-roasted coffee grounds are better tasting in darker beers, such as stouts and porters, while IPA or saison home-brewing fans will want to stick with lighter-roasted coffees, such as blondes, and avoid the medium roasts. 

There are various methods for making homemade coffee beer, so long as you have the right brewing and bottling equipment. For used coffee grounds, you can follow the same methodology as you would for unused coffee grounds, which involves first putting the grounds in a muslin or mesh bag to prevent any gritty residue from mixing with the actual beverage. You can then try the hot method, which involves steeping the grounds in hot water and then adding the mixture to the fermenter, whereas the cold method involves an overnight steep after those same steps. If you're adding the grounds directly into a fermenting batch, almost like adding cinnamon sticks to a potpourri, you'll have to keep an eye on the fermentation — the longer it brews, the stronger the coffee taste.

Coffee beer has been around long enough that there are several hundred recipes out there on the internet and even a few dozen pre-bottled coffee-flavored beers, which we tried and ranked here. It's not just small, local groups making these beers, either. It's also big-name beer brands, like Dogfish, Funky Buddha, Guinness, and more. The great thing about home brewing is that you're free to experiment, fail, and try again until you find a combination that suits your fancy. So maybe those leftover Starbucks blonde-roast grounds don't taste the best in a beer, but who's to say a combination of locally sourced Ethiopian and Sumatran beans won't taste absolutely divine?