BeerWise Podcast
The BeerWise Podcast, hosted by Mark DeNote, editor of Florida Beer News, delves into the dynamic world of craft beer, offering listeners a comprehensive look at industry trends, news, and in-depth interviews with key figures shaping the beer landscape.
Each episode explores the past, present, and future of brewing, providing insights into the evolution of beer styles, brewing techniques, and the stories behind renowned breweries. Whether you're a seasoned beer enthusiast or new to the craft beer scene, BeerWise serves as an engaging platform to expand your knowledge and appreciation for the art of brewing and craft beer culture.
BeerWise Podcast
Ep. 35: David Nilsen and The Art and Science of Pairing Craft Beer and Chocolate
David Nilsen, the mind behind "Pairing Beer and Chocolate," joins the BeerWise podcast and takes us on a flavor journey, challenging preconceived notions of traditional pairings. Discover how David’s unique path, from hosting a pairing series to launching his podcast, Bean to Barstool, led him to unravel the rich tapestry of flavors found in the unlikely union of craft beer and chocolate. Together, we peel back the layers of complexity in these pairings, blending science, culture, and taste in a way that flips conventional wisdom on its head.
Navigating the flavorful landscape of beer and chocolate isn't always smooth sailing. Thanks to the bitter-sweet interplay these two robust ingredients bring to the table, we dissect why some pairings soar while others sputter. From palate fatigue to balancing bitterness with sweetness, the art of pairing becomes both a challenge and a passion, sparking newfound insights into familiar processes. Let our personal rating system guide you through this gustatory adventure—one that might just inspire you to explore your own culinary curiosities.
In the rapidly expanding world of craft chocolate, parallels to the craft beer boom are impossible to ignore. We explore the evolving narrative of this burgeoning industry, where strategic collaborations and storytelling are as essential as the cacao itself. Featuring tales of chocolate-beer fusion from places like French Broad Chocolates, we illustrate how these gourmet endeavors are more than mere trends—they're a celebration of authenticity and craftsmanship. Tune in to find out how the intersection of beer, chocolate, and curiosity-driven careers offers a rich, layered experience waiting to be savored.
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Hello and welcome back to the BeerWise podcast. This is the podcast that looks at what's going on in the world beer-wise. Hello and welcome back to the BeerWise podcast. I'm your host, mark Deneau, and I'm the editor of Florida Beer News.
Speaker 1:When I read the book Pairing Beer and Chocolate, I knew I wanted to talk to the author, david Nilsen. The book forced me to take a look at the world of pairing food and beer and opened my mind to the possibilities beyond stouts and porters with this unique food item, outs and porters with this unique food item. There's been surprisingly little written on the topic and David has certainly raised the bar with his book, along with his website and podcast, both called Bean to Barstool. David talks about his interest in beer and chocolate, how writing about beer and chocolate has evolved for him and the future of chocolate. In Bean to Barstool, what I thought would be a conversation simply about pairing food items with beer quickly shifted into a discussion about how working with other items beyond beer helps the appreciation and application of beer knowledge. Here's our conversation. Thank you very much for joining me on the Beer Wise podcast talking about beer and chocolate today, a conversation I'm very interested to dive into.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for having me on. I'm excited to talk about it to dive into. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to talk about it. Yeah, yeah, can you talk about going into starting off with the book, which was really? I listened to the podcast a little bit, but the book was really fills a very niche spot in the craft beer world, but it's one that is as somebody who does tastings and does pairings. It's a challenge and it has some stereotypes and I want to talk to you about your background and how did you get into this world of pairing beer and chocolate with enough content to write a book on it?
Speaker 2:beer and in that capacity, about six or seven years ago, I was doing an ongoing pairing series with a local restaurant beer bar just different types of food, different cuisines, every month. You know cheese pairing, you know different ethnic cuisines, things like that and they wanted to do a chocolate and beer pairing. And I thought, naively, naively well, how complicated can that really be? You know it's chocolate, and reached out to someone I knew locally who worked with craft chocolate and she quickly dispossessed me of that naivety and set me on the path of learning more about craft chocolate and I quickly discovered that this was as robust and fascinating a world as craft beer, uh, from a flavor standpoint, from a science standpoint, from a cultural standpoint, and from there those kinds of became parallel pursuits for me. So I for myself, became very interested in pairing beer and chocolate. Uh, continued to bring that into my professional world when I could, trying to arrange beer and chocolate pairings professionally and things like that, and that really took off for me in 2020.
Speaker 2:Like everybody else, I had a lot of free time, so that is when I launched my podcast and website being to bar stool, which looks at the intersections of craft beer and craft chocolate. Out of that. Then I started leading more events once we could get back to doing that the next year and then in 2022, as you mentioned, this is a niche interest. Nobody had really covered this. Occasionally, you'll see, you know, in a broad beer and food pairing guide online, maybe they'll mention chocolate and say, pair it with a porter stout, and then move on. Uh, but nobody had published anything about it, and I realized that I had a lot of accumulated information that I had been gathering for myself. I had been talking about this on the podcast, and so initially what I did was put this together in a zine, just like a self-published little stapled zine. That was quite popular and I decided that it was worth then expanding that into a paperback book, so that came out earlier this year. Pairing Beer and Chocolate.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, and the book dives into a realm. That was very interesting to me. I was in a similar situation and I read somewhere about a fluke or not a fluke, but just the pairing beer and chocolate in the world of like Rodenbach Sours, and especially with the Rodenbach Classic and dark chocolate, and that pairing just kind of blew my mind and it opened my mind to the possibility of it. And then when I saw your book, are there any other? Are there any? What was the biggest surprise, I guess, is where I'm trying to go with this question Were there any pairings that kind of blew your mind a little bit with something you didn't expect? Were there?
Speaker 2:any pairings that kind of blew your mind a little bit with something you didn't expect. One of the first pairings that I ever did when I was doing initial practice pairings to plan that original pairing, the very first professional pairing with chocolate that I was going to be doing, I got a couple of friends together, sat down at our table, had a bunch of beers and a bunch of chocolates that I had bought. I really had nowhere to start with, so I was just like, look, we're going to try all these, we're going to take notes and I'm going to come up with something from that. And one of the ones that really really got my attention was a white chocolate pairing with Belgian wit beer. It was a white chocolate made by J Coco out of Seattle and it had cayenne pepper and orange peel in it and paired with the wit beer, it was just absolutely beautiful that the cayenne pepper is not super hot, but it did pull forward a little bit of that fermentation spice from the beer. You have this really creamy texture together between the, the wheat and the high carbonation in that beer style, along with that very creamy white chocolate, and then of course you have the orange peel in both and it was just this really eyeopening pairing.
Speaker 2:Contrary to popular misconception, white chocolate is chocolate. It is made with cacao. It just isn't made with cacao solids. It's made with cacao butter, which is the cocoa beans are about 50% solids and 50% fat, and so the cocoa butter is the fat half of that. So it is made from cacao. It is the product of farmers, and white chocolate is legally and I will say, spiritually chocolate, just like dark or milk chocolate are.
Speaker 2:But that one really opened my eyes, not only because it was a good pairing, but because it was such a surprising and unusual combination. When you just abstractly think of beer and chocolate, if it's not something you do very much, you're thinking a dark beer and a dark chocolate, you're thinking stout and dark chocolate or something. This was so polar opposite of that expectation but it worked so well that I realized there was an entire world here of flavor possibilities. You mentioned Rodenbach. That's funny because Flanders Red Ale is one of the most versatile chocolate pairing styles and I recently did a Instagram Live with Chris Leguizamon, who's the educator for Pure Project out in San Diego, and it was all focused on pairing chocolate with Flanders Red Ale because it's his favorite style, so we were talking all about doing that. That is a very, very good style for pairing.
Speaker 1:Awesome, awesome. And that's where we've all done the and there's still a lot of run room with Porter and Stout and chocolate I'm sure. But that's kind of the, that's the easy one, like I want to go. It's kind of the reason why I got into craft beer. You know I can drink a lot but I want to see the weird stuff, the cool stuff, the fun stuff. And then one thing I have to ask you is, before we go forward, because I've got a line of questions but did you get to a point where you can kind of pull chocolatiers out of your mind the way that a lot of us can with beers, because I know you can just reference a chocolate that's made by some artisan in washington, the way I can reference a brewery, but a lot you know. So many of us say you know this brewery by this, this beer with this brewery? Do you get to a point where you can kind of just quick recall some of the chocolatiers in there?
Speaker 2:Absolutely and honestly. There is so much in common between craft chocolate, culturally, and craft beer. So the same kind of dynamics of different strata of chocolate makers just like we have kind of different groups in our head of types of breweries, whether it's by size or what they focus on, or quality or whatever it might be, those same things exist in chocolate, have kind of different groups in our head of types of breweries, whether it's by size or what they focus on or quality or whatever it might be. Those same things exist in chocolate and the marketing for both of these is very similar. The emphasis upon label art and the names and branding that comes up around different types of bars.
Speaker 2:The use of additional flavor ingredients in beer we'd call those adjuncts. In chocolate we call them inclusions, which I think is honestly a better word. I think we should use that in beer. It sounds a lot more appealing than adjunct. But they're very, very similar and there's a lot of crossover.
Speaker 2:And so the way that all of us, as craft beer fans, think and talk about breweries and specific beers and oh man, it's here in about a paleo that's a classic. Or there's this little beer from the local brew pub that you got to try. If you stop in. There is the same thing those of us in craft chocolate are doing with these bars. The one great thing about chocolate is that there's no restrictions on shipping it, so you can get access to even these tiny makers that are in different places around the country and get those chocolates delivered directly to you, which is not something that we have available on the beer side. There's some delivery, but chances are you're never going to have access to the majority of beers out there, unless you travel to those breweries. So, yeah, no, absolutely. We talk and think about our chocolate makers and bars very similar to how we do on the beer side.
Speaker 1:And is there an availability issue in terms of are there seasonal bars that you can only get at certain times? Because the one thing that's a little bit intimidating to me is having to ship stuff, having to ship or having to buy in large quantities in order to make the shipping worth it. Does that exist in the chocolate world, or is there a retailer that does a lot of the good with?
Speaker 2:chocolate. There's both. So the individual makers do ship Shipping sometimes. I mean with everything else. Shipping is going up, of course, and shipping sometimes can be prohibitive. Almost all of the big chocolate makers have some kind of volume incentive. Usually that's around $75 or $100, but of course varies maker to maker. The one difficulty with shipping chocolate is in the warmer months or in a warmer climate, because this will melt. So a lot of makers will include cold packs or something like that. But still, generally I shy away from ordering much chocolate during the summer. Right now I'm kind of in a bonanza of ordering chocolate because it's finally cool enough for me to get a shift without having to worry about that.
Speaker 2:But there are also retailers that group together bars from all sorts of different makers. One very good one is Bar Coco all one word barandcococom. They're out in Denver but they have dozens and dozens of different makers and bars. On the seasonal standpoint that you were asking about, it's very comparable to what we see on the beer side. There are bars that are seasonal just because a maker says they are similar to how a brewery might release their black IPA at a particular time of year, even though there a brewery might release their black IPA at a particular time of year, even though there's nothing that has to be seasonal about that. But then there are also bars, particularly with seasonal ingredients, that we think of as seasonal, like there's pumpkin spice bars out right now, or Christmas themed bars or apple cider bars out right now. So there are also things that are seasonal, that are specifically tied to our perception of a season. And then, of course, there are your, your cores, that are around all year round.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay. And then so for the book. How many, how many unsuccessful pairings did you have to soldier through in order to make was it like a 10 to 1, a 5 to 1? How many of these pairings did you have to take one for the team in order to find those awesome pairings?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I don't know the actual ratio, but there are definitely way more failures than successes. One of the things that I think is really fun about pairing beer and chocolate specifically is that, while the highs are really high, it is challenging and it's one of the reasons that I think this book, or an A resource, is important. If you want to pair beer and cheese, there are good pairings and bad pairings, but if you get five or six cheeses and five or six beers, you're going to probably have more that are fine or good than ones that are just disasters. It's going to work reasonably well. Now, not all of those are going to be great, and if you're going to plan a professional pairing, obviously you're going to need to fine tune those. But you can just grab some cheeses and some beers and have a fun casual pairing and everybody enjoy themselves.
Speaker 2:With chocolate, there are a lot of pitfalls, and when it doesn't work it really doesn't work. The bitterness that can be present in higher percentage dark chocolate in particular can just clash with both roast and hot bitterness. On the beer side, you have a difficulty of perceived sweetness versus actual residual sweetness, which is something we see in beer as well. You have flavors that might seem sweet, but there's not actually any sugar there. That's backing it up. It's just a mental connection between caramel and the presence of sugar, but that caramel might not actually mean that there's sugar there. That might just be a melanoid reaction in the malt or something. Same thing happens on the chocolate side, and so it gets really tricky to figure out. Okay, are these actually going to work, or is there going to be a base level clash between bitterness levels, lack of body, lack of sweetness? So the highs are really high and the lows are really low. And so there are a lot, definitely, of failed pairings. And even now, having gained what I would like to think of as expertise in this area, there are still things that will surprise me that I thought were going to work. And I try them out and it's like nope. That's another note to take down of something to learn from that.
Speaker 2:I, for myself, use a spreadsheet and a rating system for pairings. I am pretty anti-rating systems publicly like for a consumer-facing standpoint. I don't use Untappd. I don't love those sites. If anybody uses them, that's great. If it works for you, I think that those can be misleading sometimes for their stated goal, but for myself. I find it valuable as a way to kind of organize what is working in pairings and what isn't. It's a very simple system, zero through five, and then I can organize based on that and look at everything that scored well and say what's in common here, what do these all have in common that made this work, and then kind of taste test those further to fine tune that in. So that's kind of been my process. There are still plenty of surprises and failures, but I would like to think my batting average is improving after devoting a lot of time to this for years.
Speaker 1:Do you find that palate fatigue becomes a factor that you can only do? I mean, how many I know cheeses? You can probably go a little further and then stretch it with some refreshers, but how far do you go into chocolate tasting before you just say well, I think I'm shot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, it's definitely an issue. I would say that it doesn't differ too much from palate fatigue in general. The one thing to keep in mind, though, is accumulated bitterness over time. Bitterness, of our basic tastes, is the one that takes the longest for our taste buds to register, but it's the one that lingers the longest on our tongues, our tongues. And because bitterness is the big outlier, the big thing that can really throw off these pairings between beer and chocolate, if you have several that have an elevated level of that, that can start to just kind of sit on the tongue and start to affect subsequent pairings. So, generally, if I'm going to try to test drive pairings and I need to really have an accurate sense of this I'm probably going to limit that to five or six at the most. Now, if I'm just kind of generally getting a sense of something, I might do more than that and then go back and fine tune those when I'm, you know, a little bit sharper. But I would say five or six before you start running into that issue.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then? How has your knowledge of beer grown after diving into a world that's very similar yet different?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. I would encourage anybody who loves beer to find something else you love in the food or beverage space, because having something to compare and contrast with helps you think through things that you've just information you've just kind of taken as a given on the beer side and maybe not evaluated or not thought through. So why particular processes occur, where particular flavors come from, how ingredients are used. That could be chocolate, that could be coffee, it could be bourbon, it could be whatever.
Speaker 2:But have something else that you get into, because that curiosity about flavor and ingredient and process will come back and help expand and fill in your understanding of beer as well. So being able to look at chocolate both from things that are directly comparable fermentation, roasted flavors, the use of the same ingredients in one or the other obviously allows you to think directly about that. The process of learning how to taste chocolate and how does that differ from tasting beer can help you think through why you're tasting beer, the way you do, and where flavors are coming from and how you're perceiving those. So I find tremendous value even if it were only for my work in beer in having something else that I've really fallen down the rabbit hole with because it allows you to look at something from a different angle and we tend to get into patterns with something that we're around all the time and stop thinking through some of those assumptions and givens, and I've found that that really helps to kind of get you around those roadblocks and think about things in a different way.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. I never thought of it that way and, as you're absolutely right, it seems like you just get into a rut or a routine, and that's just how you always do it, and something that can break that up is very valuable. What do you see as the biggest misconception about chocolate in the beer world?
Speaker 2:I think it's one of the same problems that affects beer for folks who are not in beer, and that is an opaque wall between the ingredients and processes that lead to it and the finished product With something like wine or coffee. Those are one ingredient products and everybody understands what that ingredient is. Even if they don't know how to make wine, they understand it comes from grapes. They understand those grapes are grown at vineyards. If they've gone to a winery, there's a good chance they saw the grapes growing right there. Coffee if you're making your own coffee, you are handling the beans, you're handling the actual ingredient right there at the point of making that. And so both of those worlds have done a really good job of keeping the importance of agriculture and ingredients front and center, and everybody understands that those are important, even if they don't know the actual processes. Beer is made from four different ingredients and it's just something that shows up on shelves and the majority of consumers don't think about it as an agricultural product. They don't think of it as something that has to be made in the same way that wine does. Chocolate is the same thing. Chocolate is something we buy at the store in a wrapper. We never think about it. It's made in a factory somewhere. God knows what it's made from. It just tastes good and nobody thinks about it.
Speaker 2:Chocolate is an agricultural product. It is made from cacao, which is the seed of a tropical fruit that is grown within about 20 degrees of the equator, north and south, all around the world, and it is grown by farmers and farm laborers and it is fermented and processed by those farmers and farm laborers. And out from the human side. There are significant human rights concerns within the cacao supply chain. A lot of farmers and farm laborers are not paid enough for the work they do and they're living below the poverty line, and one of the works of Kraft Chocolate and Kraft Chocolate Makers is trying to make sure that those farmers and workers are being paid a living wage for that.
Speaker 2:So I think one of the big misconceptions about chocolate is the same thing that dogs beer which is. People don't necessarily stop and think about this as an agricultural product and an artisan product that has all of the same care given to it that your favorite bourbon or wine or specialty coffee or anything else does. So I think that's a major misconception. Still within beer, people hear that something is a chocolate beer, a pastry stout, a dessert stout, and it carries with it this perception of fakeness that, oh, that's just a kind of a gimmicky, like you just added flavors to that and cacao is.
Speaker 2:It's a fruit, it's an agricultural ingredient. These beers with cacao or chocolate or other forms of that can be made with all the care that something made with foraged you know ingredients or you know a spiced beer that has cinnamon or whatever else. I mean these are things that are grown by farmers and if the brewers think about that in a thoughtful way and if we can communicate that to consumers, it changes your perspective on beers that sometimes get looked down on and denigrated as not legit, not real, because they're using something that's fake. It doesn't have to be anything fake about this. It's a product of farmers and can have all the care and complexity and nuance of anything else.
Speaker 1:It's interesting you say that and you put that that way, because chocolate in self in beer is almost a misnomer, where I don't know a lot of brewers that actually brew with finished chocolate, because the liquid and melting component of it. And so you end up is it cacao? Is it extract? Is it syrup, is it? And so you end up, is it cacao, is it extract? Is it syrup? Is it? You know where? Where did it come from?
Speaker 1:And the world's kind of like vanilla, the world that made the product helps inform and make the beer, and that's something that. How do you communicate it on a label that's, you know, as small as as well as that? So, yeah, there, there's so much more to the story in some of those beers and some and some of them can be gimmicky and have that aspect to it, but it kind of takes away from the ones that are, because there's a whole. I remember when I first started drinking chocolate beer and how disappointed I was because there's this perception bias that you're going to be drinking carbonated Hershey syrup. But at least when I first started drinking beer uh, drinking craft beer, and there's so much more to it. There can be it can be that, but it can be something else. And when you're drinking, you know the the Yingling Hershey beer, versus when you're drinking it.
Speaker 1:Uh, I was in Asheville and uh, who was it? Pizga, I think, makes the chocolate beer that's at the chocolate that they sell it in a French broad chocolates yes. So the chocolate beer that's at the chocolate they sell it in French Broad Chocolates yes, so much different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just a couple of years ago I was able to do two nights of events in Asheville with French Broad and a bunch of those breweries, because French Broad provides cacao nibs for pretty much all the breweries that work with it around Asheville so Burial Pisgah Green man, a bunch of others with it around Asheville, so Burial Pisgah Green man, a bunch of others and so we were able to bring those brewers together at the French Broad factory and have them. You know, they did little talks about how they used it and then had tastings of all the beers and it was really cool. But yeah, that's a great example of being able to highlight that this is a agricultural nuanced quality ingredient. It is complicated by the fact that beer already has that problem of telling its story and getting people to think about those ingredients and now you're adding another one. But I think it's a worthy pursuit.
Speaker 1:Sure, sure and then. So looking at the book then, and it's small but powerful, and I'm amazed at the number of beers that made it in and the options that are there. But how long approximately did it take to compile all this information and get it into a publishable form?
Speaker 2:Sure, well, I had published the zine originally, so I had kind of been able to break up this process a little bit of starting with that original, more condensed publication in 2022. That took. I had the information, so it was just an issue of organizing it and figuring out how I wanted to put that together and then actually writing the copy for it. So that took probably two months, and then the book took another two months to expand and actually format the whole thing. So, yeah, a few months of time in between the rest of my professional life.
Speaker 1:And a lot of chocolate and beer consumed in the process. What was the biggest challenging style you found? What was the hardest style to pair a beer with?
Speaker 2:There are a few styles and I mentioned this early in the book that I don't really recommend people bothering to pair with, because a combination of high bitterness and lack of sweetness just makes them almost impossible. Things like German Pilsner, west Coast IPA, most American barley wines, something that just doesn't have a whole lot of malt presence and a lot of bitterness. If you find something, by all means let me know, but I just don't really look for those Of the things that I did include. Ironically, one of the hardest things to find really good pairings for is those classic porters and stouts. They're very flexible so you can find perfectly fine, defensible pairings for them. If you just want to nibble on some chocolate and have a beer with it, they'll be fine.
Speaker 2:But finding home-run pairings for those is pretty difficult. Sometimes that roast level or hot bitterness that we don't necessarily really think about being in those styles but can actually be fairly elevated. American porter might be 35, 40 IBUs. American stout might be even higher than that. If anybody's still brewing in American stout, those can be kind of challenging, and so finding something that goes beyond solid to really really good can be somewhat hit or miss with those styles, which is ironic because they're the first styles anybody thinks about with pairing with chocolate. They're great to keep in the fridge for those casual pairings where you just want to have some chocolate and some beer. But if you were going to actually put those together for, say, a guided pairing or something, it's a challenge to find a bar that will really make those sing.
Speaker 1:Okay, and then are there any styles that are underappreciated for their pairing prowess?
Speaker 2:Definitely. Well, we mentioned Flanders Red. I would say that that's an underappreciated style just in general, but it's a fantastic style for pairing with a lot of chocolates. Fantastic style for pairing with a lot of chocolates. Ironically, the most popular family of beers in craft beer hazy IPAs can be excellent with the right chocolates and they are not something most people would think about for pairing with chocolate.
Speaker 2:The one difficulty there is figuring out if a particular example is going to have a lot of hop bitterness or little. The lower the hop bitterness generally, the more flexibility you're going to get. But when I lead professional pairings, I'm almost always sure to include a hazy pale ale or hazy IPA. For one thing, there's a good chance that half the people in the room that's their favorite beer style, so I want to give them something to latch on to. That half the people in the room that's their favorite beer style, so I want to give them something to latch onto. But also it's so eyeopening because people are never thinking about that style with chocolate and so it really resets people's thinking for what's possible here and those are always crowd-pleasing pairings. So Hazy Pale Ales and IPAs can be fantastic, awesome.
Speaker 1:Awesome and then. So I want to transition now and talk about kind of the future and the Beans for Barstool podcast and the website that you're doing. How so you've got? So now we're talking content that's chocolate focused, because and it's not not solely beer how are the trends starting to shift around the chocolate beverage industry? Because I noticed you've got some spirits content, you've got a lot of coffee content. How, in four years of doing this, how does it? How have you seen the changes and shifts?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think we are seeing more crossover as craft chocolate gets more visibility. In general, this is still a really young industry. I mean, the first glimmers of it were in the 90s, but it didn't really take off until the late 2000s, early 2010s, so it's a couple decades behind craft beer in terms of its development. So it's still relatively young. So just a general visibility of people even understanding that this exists and why it exists and why it's different from the candy bars that they're used to buying in the checkout lane, as that continues to grow, you're seeing more producers in beverage spaces utilizing chocolate ingredients or vice versa. You're seeing a lot more collaborations. There are still more chocolate makers opening, and so when a chocolate maker opens up in a particular city or town now, they might have the ability to reach out to their local cidery or distillery or brewery or whatever it might be to, or coffee roaster, to be able to figure out a collaboration between those. That has paralleled the growth and the need particularly in beer, but I think in other segments as well to diversify your offerings. We're constantly hearing that breweries need to be able to offer more than just beer, whether that's something they produce themselves or bringing in something from other producers, whether it's wine or cider or non-alcoholic options, whatever it might be. So with that you're seeing more crossover between segments in general, I think, and so that kind of freedom to not just have to stay in one particular lane I think is opening up opportunities for craft chocolate makers.
Speaker 2:One recent example I just interviewed Monica Rogan from Good Now Farms Chocolate. They're up in Massachusetts, about 45 minutes outside of Boston, and they're one of the older craft chocolate makers. I want to say like early to mid 2010s is when they opened Highly respected for single origin dark chocolates and then inclusion bars. They work with a distillery in boston, boston harbor harbor distillery, to make a range of bars that are infused with different spirits from the from that distillery. They just worked with down east cider to make a hard cider bar and they're doing events with both of those beverage makers to be able to reach out to fans on both sides. So get your chocolate fans to come to this cidery and now your cider fans are going to find out about the chocolate. So I think we're seeing a lot more of that kind of collaboration and I think that has accelerated even just in the time that I've been doing this, the last four and a half years.
Speaker 1:Wow, I'm learning a lot. I didn't realize the craft chocolate industry was such an emerging industry. Is that something that kind of mirrors the rise of craft beer in the number of services? Because the biggest barrier to entry to me seems to be the price of when you go to the mass-produced chocolate and you're at $2, probably $2, $3, and then you go to a craft bar and it's much more than that, almost 100% more than that. Is that something that continues to grow and mirror the rise of craft beer? Is that something that? Is it because now, with what's happening with breweries and the quote unquote right-sizing openings and closings, is that something that where would you say that is in the, that craft chocolate is in the rise? That's going on?
Speaker 2:There are parallels but differences. We are still seeing an upward trend in growth. For one thing, the barrier of entry to become a commercial craft chocolate maker is significantly lower than craft beer. You can make very, very small batch craft chocolate. You can even do that part-time. You don't need the facility that you need to even be the smallest level of brewery. Even if you're going to be a two or three barrel brewery, you still got to have a building and a tap room and everything else. You could commercially make craft chocolate in your kitchen part-time if you wanted to. So there is a lower barrier of entry, but you don't have the same hospitality component that you have with beer. People don't get together to have a chocolate bar like we do with beer. So there are some differences there. We are still seeing growth.
Speaker 2:I think the headwinds that have affected the beer industry the last few years have affected everyone. People aren't going out the same way, they aren't spending money the same way, and we're still trying to figure out what that means. That's not even a linear. They're just spending less. They're doing different things and we're still trying to figure out what that means. There are craft chocolate makers that have closed in the last few years and just said this is too hard. You know, getting our ingredients, shipping costs, logistic costs, all that stuff is going up. I would say it is. You are seeing an upward trend that mirrors some of what we saw with craft beer and I think when you're looking and I don't know enough about the business of some of these other segments to be able to say this definitively but growth tends to not be a linear, just straight line. Generally a subculture, kind of a sub-interest, is going to exist below the surface for a long time, building its base, the producers gaining knowledge and starting out as kind of scrappy, the equivalent of homebrewers, but then kind of slowly accumulating things. Then you kind of reach a tipping point where that curve starts to go up and kind of becomes more mainstream. And then you have a different type of growth and I think we hit that in craft chocolate.
Speaker 2:Not too long after beer really exploded about 10 or 12 years ago, you had fits and starts of growth with craft beer, you know, staying fairly quiet in the 80s, early 90s, an explosion of growth. Then maybe oversaturation or maybe something else. That kind of hit the bubble around 2000,. Another about 10 or 12 years of just kind of holding steady and treading water. And then, 2012 to 14, we just went through the roof with the number of breweries that were opening. Craft chocolate wasn't much behind that, just a couple years, if anything.
Speaker 2:So, even though it started much later, I would say probably a sociologist who knows more about consumer trends than I do would be able to say that had more to do with cultural changes than it did with those specific industries. The way we were looking at artisan goods around that time Us elder millennials were coming of age and figuring out how we wanted to spend our money and what we were interested in, and that leaned toward those artisan products. So that kind of extended to everything Bourbon and changed how we drink wine and coffee and everything else. So that's a long way to say that I think there are parallels. There are definitely differences because of the difference of the products themselves that somewhat dictate that, but there are definitely things to look at that they have in common, like that.
Speaker 1:And so it kind of that what you're talking about. Really, I do see the parallels in the mirroring and the kind of the I hate to use it because it's so overused with the rising tide raising all boats and in the craft chocolate. Well, what is what is kind of so? In beer, there's hazy ipas, there's these these up and down trends. In the chocolate, what is the? The hazy ipa of the chocolate world? What is the kind of the? What are people arguing about in the chocolate world right now?
Speaker 2:sure, I don't. I don't think we probably have a direct equivalent to hazy ipas. What one of the things I think is interesting in comparing the two. In general, on the beer side, you have your classic styles or classic brands where you've got whether it's traditional European lager styles or the first generation pale ales and porters and things that we were brewing a couple of decades ago in craft beer, the core brands that people grew up drinking from these breweries. And then you have changing consumer interests where it's hazy IPAs and fruited sours and a few other things, and there can be this uncomfortable tension between those. Even if you enjoy those trendier styles right now and even if, rightly, you are not wanting to gatekeep against them, there can still be a tension there.
Speaker 2:Of craft chocolate, this is an emphasis on just that.
Speaker 2:One foundational ingredient really puts the emphasis on the importance of origin and the farmers who are growing this in a particular place and the craft chocolate makers really, really love those bars and the way that the brewers are probably drinking that perfect pilsner at the end of their shift.
Speaker 2:Uh, but what's selling largely is those inclusion bars and the things that have really interesting ingredients to them and those can be awesome and you should. You don't have to love one and hate the other, but there can be a bit of an uncomfortable tension there of is this stealing from the thing that really got us started and that was the foundation of this? And how do we keep those single origins alive, in the same way that we want to keep American Porter or Amber Ale or Munich Helles alive in the face of these consumer trends, without demonizing those trends or the people who are enjoying those? So I think that is an interesting parallel. I don't think we have a hazy IPA, there isn't one thing that is stealing the show but there is that tension between trends and flavor ingredients and kind of the classic way that this was done.
Speaker 1:That's fascinating because even in the way you phrased that, I mean, I could see the parallel between because it's not. While the players are different, the show is the movie, the play is the same and it is. It's this tension between the new school and the old school, and what we consider to be beer, what we consider to be chocolate. That's fascinating. One last question before we wrap up. I want to be respectful of your time, but I'm curious. What keeps you writing about podcasting, about covering this chocolate sphere? What is it that gets you out of bed in the morning when it comes to this product?
Speaker 2:Yeah well, it's not getting rich.
Speaker 1:Isn't that the truth?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I am, and I don't know what this is about my thinking. I'm sure a psychologist would be able to explain something about the way that my brain works and the way I look at things. But I love finding connections between different segments. You know I love if you're talking about one sport finding the comparison in a different sport and looking at how those are the same but how they're different and how the dynamics change. I'm fascinated by having these two different worlds and finding the connections and the contrasts and similarities between them and I find that and again, like I said, a psychologist would be able to explain this to me because I don't know that. I have an easy explanation for understanding why, but for some reason, being able to see this thing that exists on both sides beer and craft chocolate kind of perpetually keeps me excited about both of them. I would love beer on its own and I would love chocolate on its own. Like I said, I was working in beer professionally before this and most of my work is still focused primarily on beer as a writer is still focused primarily on beer as a writer but being able to look at a common ingredient, a common process some of the same microorganisms are involved in fermentations for spontaneous beer styles as are used in cacao fermentations. I mean, just little things like that perpetually kind of keeps that engine running for wanting to learn more and I find curiosity kind of just drives me and I kind of let that be my compass.
Speaker 2:My most recent episode is with a barista and mixologist from France and she primarily focuses on using coffee and cacao in her cocktails and she was talking about the importance of curiosity that she has just kind of let her career let her get interested in things. She didn't start out interested in mixology, she was interested in coffee. She wanted to learn about it, started using it in cocktails. Because of that, found out that cacao was being grown at the same places that coffee was a lot of the time. So then fell down that rabbit hole and just kind of let her curiosity steer where she was going with that and I found that same dynamic to really work. So even if you're focused, like we were talking about earlier, even if your focus is beer, feed your curiosity on anything that comes up, whether it is another drink segment, whether it's cheese, chocolate, whatever, and you'll be surprised the ways that that will kind of renew your excitement or expose new areas of excitement, even within beer itself. As that foundation.
Speaker 1:Well, you're absolutely right, and that's a great way to kind of pause for a second. I do like to end every episode with a six-pack of questions, so if you're game, we'll do it, okay. So the first question is every beer person's least favorite, which is what is your current favorite beer?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I knew that was coming. I hate this question.
Speaker 2:My current favorite, a beer that I continually come back to and I don't know how often people slightly sidestep the question, but a beer I continually come back to is Bell's Two-Hearted. I don't know if it's the one beer I keep with me on a desert island. I don't know what that beer is, but it was one of a handful of the very first craft beers I had. That made me excited about this, going all the way back to the mid-2000s. I had it in the perfect way. It's a Michigan beer. The Two-Hearted reference is to the Two-Hearted River in the Upper Peninsula.
Speaker 2:My family and I were camping on the shore of Lake Superior and the little town that's like the last outpost before that campground is a one gas station town. If you're going to buy beer in that town it's going to be from their one little cooler, and my sister and I ran in there. We knew absolutely nothing about beer. This was probably 2005 or 6 and there was this uh, there was uh, great lakes, edmund fitzgerald, okay, the. The ship had sunk about an hour away from where we were camping and there was uh, bells, two-hearted, and we liked the, the label art, we liked the, the packages knew. We knew nothing about these styles we're like, well, sure we'll see. And so we grabbed a six-pack of each, took them back to the campsite and those remain, kind of like the two foundational beers that got me into this originally. So you're in about a pale ale shortly after that. So I continually return to those. But I would say Bell's Two-Hearted is kind of that one that I'm always returning to.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay. If you could only drink one style, what would it be?
Speaker 2:probably belgian pale ale, uh, something like the, uh, the taras bulba type of, uh of of mold that like four and a half five percent fermentation forward, but still moderate hop uh presence dry. Uh, that's probably my. If that's all I could drink, that's what I would pick okay, what's the last beer you had?
Speaker 1:that changed your mind.
Speaker 2:I do a lot of coverage of non-alcoholic beer and so I've tasted quite a few and there's been quite a few I've enjoyed. I not too long ago had the new NA Pills from Notch Brewing up in Connecticut or Massachusetts somewhere in New England brewing up in. Are they in Connecticut or Massachusetts somewhere in New England?
Speaker 2:One of the things that dogs so many non-alcoholic beers is that wort-like flavor from the malt aldehydes and that was one of the first pale non-alcoholic beers I'd had. That was just absent, it wasn't there at all. It had that nice, crisp, lightly crackery pills malt flavor that you would expect. I feel like the hops are typically a little easier to hit in these beers but that malt flavor is not always right. So that was one. I had kind of just accepted that as a flavor that was just going to be part of these beers. And tasting that and realizing that there was a way around that and I don't know exactly what that process was, because NA producers are notoriously tight-lipped with sharing their processes that's something I've written about with annoyance before, but I was really impressed by that and that kind of opened up some new doors for looking at those beers.
Speaker 1:Awesome, awesome. Answer to some of these questions is the NA, because at one point people were surprised that there was much flavor to them at all and how much they've, how far they've come and how much they've developed yeah when it comes to beer. What do you wish? You really understood?
Speaker 2:one area of interest that I would love to dive into deeper would be all of the all of the chemical things that are happening with fermentation beyond what we typically think of as fermentation, beyond the conversion of sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide. So while I have I would like to think a solid understanding of that, there is still so much that is just still being understood and studied, and I would love to understand that living part of this process where these microorganisms are just doing so many little things that we're not aware of beyond conversion. You know, the formation of esters and phenols and all these little trace aromatic compounds and biotransformation of hop and phenols and all these little trace aromatic compounds and biotransformation of hop and malt compounds and all that. I have a working understanding, but there's still so much more, and I know that I need a better foundation in chemistry to be able to really understand why those things are happening, beyond just being able to say that they are. So I think that's something that, over the next year or so, I would really like to be able to devote more time to.
Speaker 2:As I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of overlap between the way cacao fermentation works. The primary fermenter is SACC and you got acetobacter and different things like that and I'm going to be working with a cacao agronomist on some experiments using beer strains, some Kvike strains and different things in cacao fermentation to see how they alter the flavor profile of the finished cacao. So I want to be able to understand that better on the beer side on a more technical level as a foundation to be able to kind of compare and contrast those. So I think that's something that I would like to understand better and I'm going to kind of compare and contrast those. So I think that's something that I would like to understand better and I'm going to try to over this next year.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's fascinating and something I certainly would not have thought of. What do you wish people knew about your writing your space in beer?
Speaker 2:Well, looking specifically at what we've been talking about today, with being to barstool and this comparison between beer and chocolate, I think sometimes one of the things I've discovered is that if people don't already have an interest in both things, they assume that what I'm covering is not of interest to them. And I would love for people to approach things with more curiosity, like we were talking about earlier, and say, okay, I love beer. The fact that I don't know much about chocolate should not deter me from listening, because that's going to expand the horizons for both. Not only that this is an area of passion and expertise for me that I'm devoting time to, but to approach it with that same curiosity and to approach, kind of, their entire appreciation of food and beverage with that same curiosity.
Speaker 2:Listen to podcasts that are about something besides your narrow focus. Listen to a coffee podcast, because it'll change the way you think about the tasting process. Listen to you know, read articles about wine and how they talk about wine. That's going to change how you talk about beer. So I would like people to be able to, in general, approach beer and my space within it with that kind of open-minded curiosity.
Speaker 1:And then last question what's the greatest lesson you've learned in beer and chocolate?
Speaker 2:I think the biggest lesson and this was something that was pretty foundational for me when I started doing this in the beginning of 2017, started freelancing full-time Within a couple of years. One of the things I started thinking about and having conversations about was the nature of flavor language and the tasting experience and how we need to think about that a little differently than we have previously. There's been this very codified lexicon of how we describe beer flavors, and there are a couple. There are good things about having an agreed upon vocabulary for that, being able to communicate things quickly, things like that but a couple of problems. One is we start using terms without thinking about what they mean, because we know they're the right terms. You say that something is biscuity. What's that mean? That's not what you think it means. You know that's not what, but, like we know what it actually references. Or just saying something is hoppy Well, that can mean 800 different things, but it's still a term we use. But additionally, that vocabulary has primarily been very Eurocentric. It's focused on white North Americans mostly is who came up with that. It's focused on white north americans mostly is who came up with that, and there is an entire world of palates and flavor vocabularies that we've kind of ignored.
Speaker 2:And I think, as we try to open beer up and to be more inviting to people of all sorts of different backgrounds, one really great way that we can do that is to use the tasting process and use people's individual flavor vocabulary as an invitation, not as a barrier.
Speaker 2:So if you sit down and talk with people who have a different background whether it's geographical, ethnic, racial, religious, whatever it is they have had different experiences than you've had.
Speaker 2:They've had different cuisines than you've been familiar with, different produce that is grown wherever they're from, whether it's a different part of the country or a different country altogether, and their description for what you're going to call apricot might not be apricot, it might be something else that immediately registers for them.
Speaker 2:If we can sit down in a very open-minded and invitational way with people of different backgrounds and all have the freedom to say this is what this makes me think of, have the freedom to say this is what this makes me think of, not only can that expand our own understanding of beer flavor, it can also break down barriers between people and help us learn more about each other's stories, and our senses of smell and taste are so tied to memory and emotion that it can be a very vulnerable space Even if you're not actually divulging anything.
Speaker 2:You are in a more personally vulnerable space when you're kind of opening yourself up to those connections, and so if we can use that in the tasting environment, it can not only help us think about beer differently but can help us see each other's stories differently. So I think that's something that I was fortunate to learn early on and something I've tried to incorporate in a lot of my writing and events, and I think that's something that could really be game-changing for the beer space going forward as it seeks to court new customers and just be more welcoming in general.
Speaker 1:Absolutely and Very well said, David. Thank you very much for your time. The podcast and website is Bean to Barstool. The book is called Pairing Beer and Chocolate. Thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for having me on, Mark.
Speaker 1:That was my conversation with David Nilsen of the Bean to Barstool website and podcast and the author of Pairing Beer and Chocolate. My thanks to David for taking the time to talk with me and sharing his thoughts and a few pairings. Are there any guests you'd like to hear on the show? Please reach out. I'm on social media at FLBeerNews or Mark at FloridaBeerNewscom. Let me know your opinion and who you'd like me to reach out to. Please remember to like, subscribe and follow BeerWise on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss an episode, and please remember to review the show on your favorite podcast platform and help us reach new audiences.
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