Bonus: 5 Most Versatile Beer Styles for Pairing with Craft Chocolate
•David Nilsen
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In this bonus episode, host David Nilsen talks about the most versatile craft beer styles to have on hand for pairing with craft chocolate. He explains why each style is so versatile and recommends types of craft chocolate to pair with each, and provides some information on how to host a pairing at home.
You can read David's blog post on this same topic here.
Hey everyone. I often get asked about my favorite beer style to pair with craft chocolate, and I usually try to sidestep the question by offering a style or two that will be the most surprising. Favorites change and are highly subjective, so I think it's more valuable to ask which beer styles are most versatile for pairing rather than trying to pick a single favorite style because that's going to change based on the day and my mood. Pairing beer and chocolate isn't always simple or straightforward. So having types of beer in the fridge that can work with a variety of chocolate bars can be really helpful, especially when you're starting out and just playing with pairing combinations. So here are the styles I would recommend to have on hand for home pairings, particularly if you're just having some friends over and want to try some beers and chocolates together without too much strategy and worry. So between the ones I'm going to share in just a moment, you'll be able to find a dance partner for the majority of Kraft chocolate bars. So here are what I consider to be the five most versatile beer styles for pairing with craft chocolate. Number one is English barley wine. This is the most versatile chocolate pairing beer style there is. The malt and fermentation flavors and sometimes the age-related flavors, you know, oxidation flavors that you might expect from port or sherry, cast such a wide net for finding harmonious flavors in chocolate. And the beer's body and moderate sweetness often smooth some of the rough edges. If there's some low to moderate English hop character, it can make a pairing really pop with the right bar as long as that hop bitterness isn't too high, which it usually isn't in this style. Sometimes English barley wines are barrel-aged. Barrel-aged or not, this is, like I said, the most versatile, most flexible beer style for pairing with craft chocolate. So you can grab something like JW Lee's Harvest Ale, which is an actually British uh barley wine that is uh just an amazing beer and can be had at pretty much any age. Or there are a number of American producers that uh make barley wines. Usually they barrel age them. So it's it's a little bit more rare to find an unbarrel aged barley wine here in the U.S. But grab one of these beers and you can enjoy just how flexibly they adapt to various chocolate profiles. Number two, Flanders Sour Ales. So if a bar has a dried fruit inclusion, a Flanders red or an Oudbrune will probably work reasonably well with it and might be awesome with it. The acidity and the fermentation complexity, along with the subtle fruitiness and bready and dark sugar notes, these beers have allows them to pair flexibly with a wide range of chocolate styles. These beers will work well with most dark single origin bars below about 75%, but we'll just absolutely sing with bars that featured dried fruit inclusions. So try a beer like Ducheste Bouillon or Rodenbach Grand Cru and pair it with a dark chocolate bar featuring dried stone fruits or cherries or berries or figs or anything along those lines, and it'll be awesome. Number three, hazy IPA. This is a surprising one for a lot of people. The most popular family of beer styles in craft beer is hazy IPAs, and they offer a really bright break in a chocolate pairing lineup. They are great for white chocolates or spiced bars. Hazy's are all about showcasing hop aromas and flavors, which can include tropical and citrus fruits, herbal and floral notes, and a range of more esoteric descriptors ranging from diesel to white wine. Their soft bodies and usually lower bitterness than old school IPAs allows those flavors to sit at the forefront without being competing with hot bitterness. You might not think of IPA and chocolate as obvious partners, but a beer uh like Trogue's Perpetual Haze or Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing or whatever your local brewery is offering, because just about everybody brews a hazy IPA with the right chocolate bar will change your mind on IPAs. And I really like using these with white chocolate bars with herbal or floral or spice inclusions because a lot of people also don't think they like white chocolate. So being able to combine a beer style that most people don't think of as pairing with chocolate and a chocolate style that ever like some people are just convinced they don't like, and then have that pairing be awesome is just so much fun. I always include a pairing like this in my professional pairing. So having a hazy IPA on hand can be a really surprising combination, especially when you're just having people mix and match beers and chocolates. You're there's going to be a few pairings that are going to be fantastic with this style. Number four, Belgian Dark Strong Ales. So if you have a single origin dark chocolate, give it a try here. Single origin bars can be difficult to predict pairings for with a lot of beer styles, but Belgian Dark Strong Ales, most of the beers in this category are often called quads or quadruples. We can use those terms interchangeably for the most part. These beers have notes of caramel and dark bread and dark fruit, and it allows for a lot of flavor bridges to a range of chocolates. They're fairly strong beers. Uh, that alcohol strength and a perception of sweetness can help to bridge some gaps as well. Not every combination is going to work, uh, but if you grab a beer like Cheme Grand Reserve, which is their blue label, or Rochefort 10, or St. Bernardus Abbott 12, or whatever your local brewery has, if you are fortunate to have a local brewery that is doing Belgian Abbey styles, grab one of these beers. They often have the flexibility and range of flavors to find good uh companions in single origin dark chocolates in like the 70 to 80% cacao range, particularly fruitier or uh brighter origins that can sometimes create some issues when you're trying to find a pairing for them. And then finally, Baltic porter, or really any lower bitterness porter or stout style. This is the cleanup beer in the lineup that fits wherever the others don't. Baltic porters have a much gentler roast profile, lower bitterness, and in many ways a more complex malt presentation than most other strong porters or stouts, and they cast a wide net in pairing situations and can work solidly with a wide range of chocolates, which makes them good to have on hand for impromptu pairings. So well-brewed Baltic porters can play well with a wide variety of mid-percentage single origin dark chocolates or mid-intensity bars with a wide range of inclusions. These are great utility pairing beers to have on hand. It isn't the most common style Baltic porter. So a milk stout, an oatmeal stout, an American porter, they can all fit in this spot as well, as long as their hot bitterness isn't too high. The pairings you find with these beers might not be the single most mind-blowing pairing you have in the lineup, but like I said, they're good utility beers to provide a good pairing if one of the other styles doesn't work out. So grab a beer in each of these styles and an assortment of craft chocolate bars and invite some friends over for a pairing. On the Bean to Barstool site, I have a guide for hosting a beer and chocolate pairing at home that walks you through everything you need to do. And that can range from just a casual pairing where you're having some friends hang out and try different things together, or a more guided pairing where you actually create pairing courses of this chocolate with this beer. Whatever you want to do, you can check out my guide on the site and it'll help you through that. Take some notes, encourage everyone to relax and have fun, and be sure to tell me how it goes if you do. Hope you enjoy this bonus episode of Bean to Barstool. Thanks for listening. Cheers!
