This Philly roaster and local brewery have teamed up for a coffee beer — that tastes like watermelon

When Sam Schlosberg made his weekly trip to Thank You Thank You, the specialty coffee shop in Old City, he had work on the brain.

The beermaker at Second District Brewing had his first sips of a pour-over coffee made with Rodrigo Sanchez Valencia beans. Rodrigo Sanchez is a beloved and well-respected producer based in Pitalito, Huila, Colombia, known for letting coffee beans steep together with regional fruits, which infuse their flavors into the coffee, a process known as co-fermenting. This specific crop of beans was co-fermented with watermelon and honeydew, giving its coffee a distinct, fruity aroma and taste.

As he drank it, Schlosberg said out loud: “How can we put this in a beer?” About a month later, the collab is now on tap.

Thank You Thank You owner Cody McGregor, sourced 10 pounds for Schlosberg. Weeks later, Schlosberg had created something the pair says is entirely different from typical coffee beers, which usually lean into warm, cozy, and malty flavors.

“I pitched it as this lower [alcohol] SeaQuench-style barbecuing beer that you can drink all day," McGregor said. “I feel like most coffee beers lean very heavy, like stouts and porters with bold chocolate flavors. Especially given the coffee’s big watermelon flavor profile, I thought it would be more fun to do a big, bright, acidic, farmhouse-style thing.”

Schlosberg was apprehensive, but intrigued. While the brewmaster recognizes that he has to make Second District’s flagships, like Bancroft, their daily drinker pale ale, he describes experimental special batches as his happy place.

“I know I have to be reasonable, but I hate re-brewing things,” Schlosberg said.

The result is Face Your Dreams, a tart Berliner Weisse-style wheat ale clocking in at 3.6% ABV. It’s a puckery, sour beer with notes of bright, salty melon sandwiched by coffee on the front and back ends.

It marks the first beer collab for Thank You Thank You and its sister Philly company, Poem Roasting, which supplied and roasted the coffee. (It’s not Second District’s first rodeo. One of the brewery’s recurring beers, Huy, a Vietnamese coffee stout, features beans sourced by Càphê Roasters in Kensington.)

McGregor said the team-up was a natural fit.

“I feel like coffee’s always kind of following in craft beer’s footsteps in terms of popularity and what’s happening,” he explained. Both beverages have a background of technical production processes as well as devoted fandoms, and both are the products of fermentation — though co-fermenting coffee with fruit has become especially trendy lately, something not all coffee professionals love. “It does kind of feel like coffee is in its milkshake IPA era, where people are finally starting to break out and try really out-of-the-box, funky, crazy flavors.”

After the base sour beer fermented on its own, Schlosberg introduced the coffee, steeping them together for 60 hours. Schlosberg likened it to making a batch of cold brew but on a massive scale, with beer instead of water.

“My question was, ‘Will it exude the watermelon character of the coffee?’ And honestly, I think the beer tastes more like watermelon than the coffee even did, which is amazing,” he said. “It’s exactly what I would have dreamed of.”

Its reception has already been polarizing. A bartender behind the bar at Second District on Thursday called it “not [his] favorite,” while a barista at Ultimo has returned three separate times for a pint within two days since the beer’s launch.

The five-barrel batch, which equates to about 250 pint glasses worth, is considered limited edition; Schlosberg estimates it’ll be around for about three weeks.

“It’s just fun. Philadelphia is so community-oriented and people are into similar things and supportive of each other,” McGregor said.

Face Your Dreams is available by the glass (4, 10, or 16-ounce) for $3.25 to $7.50, depending on the pour size. The brewery also offers growler fills and sometimes crowlers, subject to availability.

Second District’s sister bars, American Sardine Bar and South Philly Taproom, also have it on tap.