Drank: Stickmen Brewing's Buona Mattina Coffee Porter

As of November, bottles of Stickmen’s F-Bomb IPA and Buona Mattina coffee porter have begun to show up in area New Seasons.

Since 2012, the biggest advertisement for Stickmen Brewing has been the chance to sit on a patio overlooking Lake Oswego—a motorboaters' pond whose shores are jealously guarded by a consortium of property owners so secretive they once hired a younger version of me as minimum-wage security to keep journalists away from their meeting. But as of November, bottles of Stickmen's F-Bomb IPA and Buona Mattina coffee porter have begun to show up in area New Seasons. For refreshment, we'd advise you stick with the breeze on that Lake Oswego patio. The java in the porter is Illy, a mass-market Italian brand. It's a weird choice for a cold-brew coffee beer made in Portland: All lack of caffeine patriotism aside, Illy is not particularly known for fresh or intense coffee flavor, and imparts very little to the beer. The resulting brew is a sickly combination of roasty malts and stale-bean bitterness that tastes less like bright cold brew than the cigarette you might smoke after the cup, on a deeply hung-over morning still vaporous from the night before. Not recommended.

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