Is there a simple way to append a byte to a StringBuffer and specify the encoding?

Question

What is the simplest way to append a byte to a StringBuffer (i.e. cast a byte to a char) and specify the character encoding used (ASCII, UTF-8, etc)?

Context

I want to append a byte to a stringbuffer. Doing so requires casting the byte to a char:

myStringBuffer.append((char)nextByte);

However, the code above uses the default character encoding for my machine (which is MacRoman). Meanwhile, other components in the system/network require UTF-8. So I need to so something like:

try {
    myStringBuffer.append(new String(new Byte[]{nextByte}, "UTF-8"));
} catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
    //handle error
}

Which, frankly, is pretty ugly.

Surely, there's a better way (other than breaking the same code into multiple lines)???????