BeerMetal Rating: 4.25/5

20-UpAndDown-WM Well what do you know, during this quarantine stay at home business, I actually have the time to add more content to the site! Hard to believe that this is only the second beer to be featured here by Independence Brewing Company from Austin, TX. My really good friend Kevin is a Sales Rep Manager for the company, so I drink a lot of beer from this brewery. I actually believe I mentioned this on the last review. I’ve even visited this brewery once to witness a Metal show featuring a band that has one of their brewers as the band’s front man. Pretty cool shit. So there is an argument that Independence Brewing isn’t exactly a Craft Brewer any longer since Lagunitas owns a portion and Heineken owns Lagunitas, but to be honest, I don’t know the whole story and to be honest with you all, I love the people over at this brewery and i think they make fantastic fucking beers, so I will continue to drink and support them. I mean, they’re not owned by AB InBev at least. OK, well let’s move onto the beer.

Independence Brewing collaborated with another local Austin, TX company, Little City Coffee to introduce the coffee into this beer. According to the Independence website, they traveled up and down he world’s largest coffee producing region, Minas Gerais, Brazil in search of the right beans for this beer. After tasting countless amount of coffee there, they finally settled on beans from a Cup of Excellence award-winning grower, Augusto Borges Ferreira. It says that the caffeine provides the upper and the alcohol in the beer provides the downer, which is where I’m assuming the name of this beer comes from. Pretty clever.

This is a 12 oz can, and a beautiful can at that. They re-branded last year and i love their new look. Their cans are now wrapped in a black matte finish which makes these cans look sexy as fuck. The label is a yellow oval with a green bird carrying a blue branch with it’s talons. Underneath that is the word logo for Up and Down in white with a green outline shadow, then finally all the beer description under that logo. The colors really pop out to me. When i bought this can, it was because I was walking by the beer cooler at the store and noticed this can by it’s colors cause I know I had never seen it before. So yeah, I bought it.

I poured this beer into a slim nonic style pint glass. The beer poured Semi clear golden color topped with a large 4 inch pillow-like white head. It left excellent lacing while drinking this one.

In the nose I was able to pick up on cold coffee, white chocolate, vanilla, cream, earthiness, a bit of a nutty aroma and biscuits.

The taste of the beer was exact same with flavors of cold coffee, cream, vanilla, white chocolate, earthiness, a nutty taste and biscuit bread. The aftertaste was all cold coffee and biscuit bread.

The body was light and super easy to drink. It had a very smooth nitro body with a soft smooth finish.

Overall, I rated this beer a 4.25/5 on Untappd. I am a huge fan of Nitro beer, so I was excited to try this one. The only downside to this beer was that it may have had too much nitro gas added or something. I was warned that the can may explode. I was worried so i drank it as soon as I got home. It did foam out of the can a bit at first, but nothing major. Nothing to cry about. So it wasn’t too bad. But as you can see from the photo, that was that was the best I could get that beer with that large head in the glass. It didn’t really affect the beer though as far as aroma and flavor so that was a plus. Way to go Independence on your first coffee ale.

Metal Connection: The Metal Connection for this beer really needs no introduction. I mean this band features God within it’s line-up. Of course I am talking about the legendary Lemmy Kilmister (R.I.P.) and the almighty MOTÖRHEAD. This band began back in 1975, and were pumping out their Heavy Metal/Hard Rock sound until 2015 when Lemmy died at the age of 70. What a blow that was tot he Rock world. Shit…the world in general. With 23 full length albums there is a lot of great content released by these guys. In 1991, they released the album titled 1916 on Epic Records. Of course I try to find a similar song name to the beer name for the Metal Connections, which could give us some interesting pairings. I chose the song, “Going to Brazil” for obvious reasons here. This song is a bar fight theme song if I have ever heard one. I just imagine some dark, dirty bar and the dudes from Motörhead just fucking everybody up except for Lemmy who will just be sitting there at the bar drinking his whiskey while the fight is happening all around him. Like a true bad ass. Of course he’ll get the last hit on the main bad guy. Haha, OK, I just created the music video for this one in my head. So please find yourself a can of this Nitro Coffee Ale, and crank up this Motörhead tune, and prepare to fight!