Red wine with chocolate is like an arranged marriage. The only thing they have in common is fruit: Red wine tastes like it, and chocolate sometimes tastes good with it. However, red wine’s overbearing tannin, oak, and acid affront a fine chocolate’s complex creaminess, and neither lets the other finish a sentence. They don’t belong together.
Chocolate needs something like beer, a beverage that can be supportive. They speak the same language. They share the same bittersweet nature. Think of the beer as you would a chocolate’s center: chocolate-covered malt balls, toasted rice, toffee. They like to go to the same places on your tongue, and with Seattle’s plethora of local breweries and chocolatiers, the hookups are endless.
The flavors of chocolate vary from milk to dark, creamy to dry, sweet to bitter. Beer’s main ingredients, hops and malt, impart the same sensations. Beer tends to taste richer and rounder the more malt it has, and hops determine its perceived dryness and bitterness.
Chocolate and beer work so well together because the pairing can complement and contrast at the same time. For example, the bourbon, date, and spiced-caramel notes of Maredsous 10 Tripel ale, my favorite beer, meshes seamlessly with Fiori Chocolatiers’ strangely creamy Mezzanotte bar. The intensity of the ultra-dark chocolate is rounded out by the slightly sweet, highly aromatic beer, while the beer’s bite of higher alcohol stands up to the chocolate’s bitterness. It’s a decadent pairing that makes for a full-blown dessert.
A beer’s maltiness is more essential than its color when matching with chocolate. Wheat beers and Kölsch—even pale ales with less hopping—all make nice with milk and semisweet chocolate. The wheat pairs especially well for those who like cereal crispies in their chocolate.
With darker chocolates, choose a malt-heavy, less bitter beer. Dark beers—porters, stouts, and the like—are no-brainers, made with copious amounts of malted barley that has usually been toasted, giving the beer coffee and toffee flavors. Just stay away from extremes, and mind the bitterness, because two dark bitters do not a sweet couple make. Most American porters and stouts have the necessary sweetness-to-bitterness ratio. Earlier this month, I drank Stix Pool Shark Porter, made with Theo’s spicy drinking chocolate. The sturdy roasted-malt and peppery qualities of the beer are enrobed by the cool, creamy, sweet spice of Theo’s 3400 Phinney coconut-curry milk chocolate bar.
I like scotch ales with chocolate because they pick up their intense caramel flavor from a longer boiling of the malt. Loaded with malt, higher in alcohol, and round and sweet on the palate, the ales at once complement and cut through creamy, bittersweet chocolate confections. When my Pike Brewing Kilt Lifter met Fran’s gray-salt caramels, the two were eerily close in flavor. The bitterness of the dark-chocolate enrobing went with the malted, burnt-sugar flavors of the beer, punctuated by the satisfying random crunch of sea salt.
Put some candy in your pocket before you head to the pub (may I suggest starting with Seattle Chocolates hazelnut and mocha truffles?). With beer and chocolate, it’s not a matter of getting it wrong. It’s more likely to be just right.
