It all started with a brew…
When Mostra came into conception in 2013, beer wasn’t in the blueprints. While Co-Owner Mike Arquines dabbled in craft beer, he began to wonder what future coffee and beer might have together. Shortly after the company was started, he took his love for the world of craft beer, combined with his culinary expertise (Yes, Mike’s a technically trained and insanely talented fine dining chef!) and his skills as a coffee roaster, and paved an entirely new, exciting, and very unexpected road for Mostra by infusing our coffee into beer. The thing is… it wasn’t just any beer.
Mostra Coffee enjoys a unique relationship within the craft beer industry as the coffee provider of choice, and has collaborated with hundreds of craft breweries across the US and internationally. Mostra Coffee has been featured in over 1,500+ unique beers from 22 states, with more collaborations on the way. Many of the craft breweries are some of the largest and most recognized and acclaimed within the craft beer Industry, including Alesmith (San Diego, CA), Stone Brewing (Escondido, CA), J. Wakefield (Miami, FL), Moksa Brewing (Rocklin, CA), Toppling Goliath (Decorah, IA), and Equilibrium Brewing (Middleton, NY). Many of these highly sought after beers have received awards and have the highest consumer ratings in the craft beer industry.
Take a trip down memory lane with us as we unveil Mostra’s craft beer journey. From experimentation to big name collaborations, this unexpected adventure has been nothing short of exciting and fruitful.
"I was sending coffee samples to everyone like mixtapes"
The team starts learning how to roast at Bev and Sam's garage in 2013, and the space is quickly filled with notes, numbers, and burning beans. (Add a few more sentences about these early days).
Pushing Boundaries
With Mike highly involved in the beer scene he would frequent popular taprooms and coincidentally rub shoulders with San Diego's talented brewers. Seeing the tight knit and collaborative culture, he began to wonder what future coffee and beer might have together.
Mike owes his introduction to experimentation with craft beer to a brewery out in Anaheim by the name of The Bruery. They began testing the limits of craft beer by dabbling in adjuncting, adding flavors like chocolate and graham crackers to beer, and ultimately becoming habitual line steppers.
Mike became inspired to do the same in coffee, and in turn introduced The Bruery to Co-Owners, Jelynn Malone, and Beverly and Sam Magtanog.
AleSmith's World-Renowned Speedway Stout
Six months into business and about a month since the Wreck Alley collaboration with Karl Strauss, Mike coincidentally met AleSmith’s Brewmaster at Tornado Brewing. They got into chatting over a couple drinks, and Mike learned that AleSmith has used just about every coffee origin out there. In the hopes of securing a collaboration, Mike pitched undeniably one of the rarest and most expensive coffees on the market, Jamaica Blue Mountain, catching the Brewmaster’s attention.
Now, the seemingly impossible mission to find a barrel of Jamaica Blue Mountain began.
When all else seemed for naught, we found the last barrel in the United States, retailing for $3,000.
Since we were sourcing one of the rarest coffees in the world, Mike had to be very careful about how much he used to sample roast.
We decided to try something never done before: to cold brew the coffee and integrate it into the Speedway Stout base. It took about 20 roasts to narrow down the perfect profile for the stout base.
From there, many more adjuncted cold brews were created, such as One-Brazilian Coconuts, Nilla Killa, Ohhh, F*dge just to name a few. Thankful to the curious craft beer drinkers who followed Mike’s lead and started adding Mostra’s cold brew to their stouts. Our cold brew bottles were flying off the shelves!
Copenhagen Beer Celebration, Copenhagen, Denmark
We will never forget the phone call we received from the team at Mikkeller, a Danish world-renowned Copenhagen based craft brewery founded by school teacher Mikkel Borg Bjergsø. Mostra was being invited to participate in the Copenhagen Beer Celebration, in 2015. We were blown away that our coffee company was being invited to pour our product at one of the biggest international beer festivals. CBC is a two day event that presents some of the worlds’ best breweries. Each brewery brings their eight craziest, rarest, most hype beers – only one keg of each. Being invited to pour coffee at the event opened conversations and relationships with breweries not just nationwide, but also worldwide.
(Sam should write this part.)
Once he landed in Mindanao, he asked one of the farmers, “where can I find the coffee?” He signaled up towards the mountains and said, “Go, up!”
After an emotional trip to Mount Apo in Mindanao connecting with the people of the land, hearing their stories, reconnecting back to his own family’s farming roots, and finally seeing the dreams and visions we have had for Philippine coffee with his own eyes was exactly what we needed to keep pushing this mission forward.
Sam successfully brought back our very first bag of Philippine coffee and we knew we had to do something magnificent with it.
In early 2016, we figured out exactly what we wanted to do with some of the coffee Sam brought back from the Philippines…a craft beer collaboration.
It was crucial that we collaborate with a brewery that stood for a cause, like us, plus produced incredible product to pair this coffee, which brought us back to The Bruery. Thinking back on the early days in 2013 when we started learning how to roast in Bev and Sam’s garage in 4S Ranch, we were drinking Bruery beers—so teaming up with them and their Share This™ collaboration series plus, being the first time Philippine coffee was ever used in beer, made our wildest dreams a reality.
The Share This™ project not only featured ingredients from around the world, but also was designed to be shared with others. To take it even further, the mission was to share with those who could use our help. $1 from each bottle produced would be donated to the Free Wheelchair Mission’s efforts in the Philippines, and this collaboration alone raised $50,000 in donations!
This full circle moment was the start of our direct impact in the Philippines, and the blossoming of our mission.
From our gateway into craft beer to 1,500+ collaborations to date, and 41 upcoming collaborations, the limits have yet to be reached…wait till you see what’s next!