I never went to school with craft beer visionary Mikkel Borg Bjergsø of Mikkeller fame but I bet if I had he would have been the boy who would impatiently thrust his hand up to answer the teacher’s question first before it was even fully formed so he could hurry on to the next one.

Mikkel is now a man in a hurry, someone who can never stand still, an artist whose beers barely reach the fermentation vessel before he’s firing up the kettle in a brewery somewhere else.

You only have to look at the sheer number and styles of beer to see that Mikkel clearly has a severe case of brewing ADHD.  Last year alone he brewed or helped brew 76 new beers. Just take a moment to let that sink in.

In my experience great brewers have several traits in common, among the most prominent of them being an innate sense of curiosity. Mikkel’s curiosity is seemingly limitless. His kind of curiosity wouldn’t just kill the cat, it would brutally murder it and then, if at all possible, make a beer out of it.

It is this curiosity, this sense of what if, that possibly drives him to constantly bend the boundaries of beer. In the crazy world of extreme brewing, where anything (and preferably lots of it) can be thrown into the brewing kettle Mikkel is considered a master of his art.

But whereas a lot of brewers can make extreme beers only a few like Mikkel manage to find intense balance, even though he often plays with the most implausible combinations of ingredients, styles and flavours.

Take for example the latest Mikkeller beer I tried with the Daniel and Carl from Scnille och Schmak at The Rover in Gothenburg yesterday – Mikkeller’s Koppi Tomahawk x Guji Natural Coffee IPA.

This is yet another Mikkeller beer that stubbornly refuses to fit into any defined beer style and so once again we’re going to have to make up a new one. You’re therefore looking at a picture of the world’s first coffee IPA.

It may sound an unlikely combination but it really works! Two very different elements – an IPA lavishly hopped with US Tomahawk and Guji coffee from Sidamo in Ethiopia – somehow come together to form an intriguing beer that tastes pretty much as it sounds.

It has a strong aroma and flavour of lightly roasted coffee that produces a nutty, dry bitterness that plays off nicely against the sweet orangey fruit flavours of the IPA.  Mikkel and the baristas at Koppi Kaffe & Rosteri have clearly put a lot of thought into the type of coffee used in the beer to ensure it doesn’t become too bitter.

It’s amazing stuff and if you can find it, try it. By the time you’ve finished your glass the chances are Mikkel’s curiosity will have got the better of him again and he’s busy mashing in at a brewery somewhere creating his next piece of beery art.