Inventing Coffee Cocktails With First U.S. CIGS Champ Matt Foster

Matt Foster, a veteran Brewers Cup competitor, tried his hand at a new competition at U.S. CoffeeChamps and found huge success.

BY CHRIS RYAN
BARISTA MAGAZINE ONLINE

Cover photo courtesy of the SCA

For three different competition years, Matt Foster took to the Brewers Cup stage with the mission of bringing out the optimal flavors of his coffee. This year, Matt decided to bring that approach to a new competition: the Coffee In Good Spirits Championship (CIGS), which challenges competitors to create tasty beverages combining coffee and alcohol. (For more on CIGS, read installments of our recent series on the competition here, here, and here.)

A competitive person by nature, Matt set out to showcase the delicious flavors of an Ecuador-grown coffee in the setting of coffee cocktails. His mission was successful: At the debut U.S. CIGS Championship at March’s U.S. Coffee Championships in Kansas City, Mo., Matt took home the top prize, becoming the first-ever U.S. Coffee In Good Spirits Champion. Because this was the first U.S. CIGS Championship, the winner does not earn a bid in the 2019 World CIGS Championship in Berlin; instead, Matt receives a trip to the 2020 Sensory Summit at the University of California, Davis.

The victorious weekend for Matt didn’t take place too far from home—Kansas City is only about 250 miles west of his home base of St. Louis, where he serves as director of wholesale education for Kaldi’s Coffee. We chatted with Matt about his approach to creating coffee cocktails, the inventive drinks he concocted for the 2019 U.S. CIGS Championship, and much more.

Chris Ryan: Can you describe your coffee background? How long have you been in coffee, how did you come to work in it, and how long have you been with Kaldi’s?

Matt Foster: I’ve been in coffee for a little over 10 years now. I started drinking coffee fairly early on—at the tender age of 4, according to my mother—so I naturally gravitated toward wanting to work with it. I got my first job in coffee while I was in high school at the Salt City Café, a small shop that has long since closed in my home town of Manistee, Mich. During my year and a half there, I learned that I loved serving people and making them feel welcome.

After moving to Kalamazoo to attend Western Michigan University, I started working at the downtown café for Water Street Coffee. They had an excellent training program, so I really learned a lot about coffee even though I was only with them for just under a year. After graduating I moved to South Korea for three years to teach ESL and was able to explore the coffee shops, teahouses, and cocktail bars that side of the world has to offer.

Once I returned to the states I moved to St. Louis and started working for Kaldi’s. I started as a barista at their Kayak’s Café location and worked my way up to where I am now, director of wholesale education. This April will mark year eight with Kaldi’s.

What were your previous coffee competition experiences like?

I’ve competed in the Brewers Cup three times; 2018, 2016, and 2014. All of those experiences taught me just how much you have to relish the process—also handling late sleepless nights, but mostly the process thing. Spending your evenings and weekends developing recipes, shopping for wares, writing a speech, and practicing your routine are definitely draining, but I would get such a sense of accomplishment as each piece came together. Those small victories helped me keep going so I could eventually get to a place where I was confident in what I would present on stage.

Why did you want to compete in CIGS? Were you previously interested in coffee cocktails? If so, what’s interesting to you about that combination? 

I’m a fairly competitive person by nature, so the coffee competitions have always appealed to me. I’ve also had a personal interest in wine, spirits, and cocktails in general for years, so this naturally led me to being interested in using coffee in cocktails. Luckily, Kaldi’s provided several platforms for me to express and refine my ideas.

Specialty coffee presents a unique challenge in cocktails. You need concentrated amounts so you don’t water down the cocktail, but you also don’t want to lose their distinctive flavors to the other ingredients when trying to balance them. This challenge and the array of flavor combinations I’ve found along the way have kept me coming back to coffee cocktails over the years.

What was your approach to creating your CIGS drinks? How long did you experiment, and what ideas were guiding your experimentation?

My guiding idea for the competition was to create great-tasting and unique cocktails that were only possible with my coffee. I wanted the rye whiskey and other ingredients to complement the coffee, not the other way around. Something I discussed during my finals round performance was how much people are willing to pay for a cocktail versus a cup of coffee, even though just as much time and effort went into creating that bag of coffee and that bottle of spirits. So it’s my hope that by not only using but highlighting amazingly sourced and tasting coffees in great cocktails, we can create another avenue to help people understand what sets specialty coffee apart. This idea of presenting a menu of cocktails that would only be around for as long as the coffee lasted excited me, so I just let that and the flavors guide me and my recipes.

We were only given about two weeks notice that Redemption Rye was the sponsoring spirit, so I did a lot of experimenting in that short amount of time. Luckily I had a great team around me and, specifically, the beverage director at the restaurant Blood & Sand and president of the Bartenders Guild in St. Louis, Brad Phillips, was generous with his knowledge of ingredients and feedback.

Can you briefly describe the drinks you made on stage?

The coffee I used for all of my cocktails was the Ecuador Fausto Romo Sidra. This coffee was part of Kaldi’s Cupping Room Series where we source exceptionally high-quality coffees that are only available for a short time. Both as brewed coffee and espresso, it had flavors of pink lemonade, purple flowers, toffee, and fruity jams.

For round one, my hot drink utilized a siphon coffee brewer to infuse the base of my cocktail, rye whiskey, cherry liqueur, brown sugar simple, and water, with dry spices, citrus peels, flowers, and herbs. I then added this infusion to a few ounces of a slightly concentrated Kalita pourover and garnished it with a lemon wheel studded with whole cloves. There was a lot going on with this one so I ended up calling it “The All In.”

My cold drink used espresso, brown sugar simple, cranberry liqueur, dry vermouth I infused with oolong tea, cracked white pepper, an egg white, and the rye whiskey. I shook these together, fine-strained them, and garnished the cocktail with cranberries (to mimic coffee cherries) and coffee plant leaves on a metal skewer. This one seems like a lot too, but the flavors came together beautifully and I really felt it highlighted the coffee perfectly, so I called it “Mr. Romo’s Opus.”

For the finals round I served my cold drink again, and we all had to serve a traditional Irish coffee of our own making. Mine used Jameson Stout Cask, Tullamore Dew Cider Cask, brown sugar simple, honey simple, and Shatto heavy cream. I named the cocktail “The Pride of Higgins” after the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, who is an outspoken human rights activist and has traveled to parts of Central and South America over the years to promote this. 

Finally, how did it feel to win?! Was this your first time winning a coffee competition?

Since this was the first year CIGS was being held in the U.S., I had no idea what kind of competition I would be up against. So to hear my name called last after having watched all of the other incredible competitors is still amazing to me. This was my first CoffeeChamps win, so combined with the build-up from previous years of competition, nitpicking my finals run, and having my former coworker but constant friend Kaley Gann win the U.S. Brewers Cup competition that same night, it made the whole experience seem truly surreal.