Floozy coffee roasters smiling over contribution to Heaps Normal Coffee Run Stout beer

Heaps Normal's Coffee Run Stout, launched nationally on Thursday, is being dubbed the "all-day breakfast beer of champions".

The stout is available at Floozy's retail coffee cafe on King Street in Newcastle West, and at The Ship Inn pub in Newcastle East.

Heaps Normal is a leading Australian non-alc beer brand with the only non-alc beer to get a spot on this year's much-lauded GABS Hottest 100 list of top craft beers. Its Quiet XPA was named the World's Best low- and no-alc pale ale at the 2022 World Beer Awards.

The limited-release "Coffee Run Stout "contains all the roast malt sweetness and hoppy bitterness of a full-strength brew with the added depth of flavour from Floozy's pineapple, cherry and dulce de leche-forward Golden Hour bean blend. Each can contains about one-fifth of the caffeine of a standard espresso.

"It's part of a beverage you can drink at any time of the day," Mujana says of Coffee Run Stout. "It kind of brings beer into the coffee and coffees into the evening. I think it's a really interesting collaboration."

Is it more coffee or more beer?

"I think it tastes like a coffee stout," she says. " It takes like what it is."

And proudly, it's got the Floozy touch.

"I can taste our coffee through it," Mujana says. "It doesn't taste generic. I do feel it retains the acidity and caramel flavours that we really prize in Golden Hour and I feel like it does show that through."

The partnership came about quite organically, Mujana says.

"It just happened," she says.

"I had their beer in our fridge, and then I found out that they had our coffee in their office, and it just kind of like, naturally, turned into a collaboration, which is pretty cool."

Before Mujana got into the coffee game, she was in the beer industry.

The beer collaboration is really the cream on top for Floozy, a home-grown success story that started with a small retail coffee cafe on Glebe Road, Merewether, in 2017, with Mujana and her life partner, Hal Gibbs.

Earlier this month a photo memory of that shop randomly popped up on Mujana's social media. She laughed with surprise.

"I still have the notebook we used for record keeping," she says. "On our first day we made $88. I was so excited about it. It was incredible to us."

The business has evolved in six years; they transitioned into roasting (learning the skill renting roasters by the hour). In 2019 they opened Bestie's cafe on King Street. During the pandemic they closed the retail store, but kept roasting coffee beans - just Kmac, Hal and their two-year-old son on deck.

Now, Floozy sells its roasted beans in China, Hong Kong and Canada; and in every Australian state, and supplies leading Newcastle food retailers including Baked Uprising (from this month), Doughheads, Cakeboi, and Cadre at Harris Farm Markets and University of Newcastle.

Floozy offers two blends (for milk coffee): Lucky Star and Golden Hour. The Floozy style is a light roast, with emphasis on drawing out the character of the beans' origin.

Lucky Star is a "chocolatey, bold, rich coffee", Mujana says, while Golden Hour is "caramelly, fruity, more of a specialty coffee".

Golden Hour was the perfect choice for the Coffee Run Stout, Mujana says. "It has a llittle more acidity to it so it really shines through when you add it to this sparkly context - a carbonated beverage."

Floozy has a wider selection of microlot coffees on offer.

"We have five different microlots right now on the shelf," Mujana says. "Single origin, coffee from one specific farm or producer. We don't mix that with anything else. It showcases the regions they are from. It depends on time of year. At the moment, there is a lot of variety in coffee. Sometimes, it is African heavy if it is that time of harvest. Or most of our menu will be different Colombian coffee."

"The real skill in roasting coffee is tasting coffee," Mujana says. " Roasting it, tasting it, seeing what the issues are, going back and roasting it again. As you get more comfortable on your own machinery, you know what to do. So, now that we our own machine, we're pretty vibed in. A little bit less trial and error. We know what we need to do for the individual origin."

Her go-to coffee: a batch brew or an oat flat white. Any time of the day.