Bean to Barstool

Beer & chocolate belong together. In today’s episode we’ll look at a number of recent chocolate and beer collaborations, including beers made with ethically-sourced cacao and craft chocolate made with beer or beer ingredients. Hopefully you discover some new tasting experiences to try out, or if you’re a brewer or chocolate maker, some inspiration for a new project. Just be sure you let me kno...

"I think each chocolate can say something different in each of its own settings. I think it’s more of what you’re looking for it to say to you. You can sit on your couch and essentially travel around the world with chocolate." Rebecca Hess is the founder and chocolate maker at Cleveland Chocolate Company in Cleveland, Ohio. Rebecca was a classically trained fine dining chef who fell in l...

“Chocolate should be fun. It should be a fun experience to eat it. We grow up eating it as candy, and what we produce is for adults, for the kid inside all of us.” Kjartan Gíslason is the founder of Omnom Chocolate in Reykjavik, Iceland. Omnom is known not only for their delicious and creative bean to bar chocolate, but for the colorful packaging and marketing that presents the spirit of Omnom to...

Join me for a look back at my favorite beers and chocolates of 2021, with some pairings along the way. After you’ve listened to the show, I’d love to hear your own favorites from this bizarre trip around the sun. In the episode, you’ll also hear favorites from some of my friends in the beer and chocolate worlds. You’ll hear from: Ruvani de Silva is a prolific and talented beer journalist living in...

“From the first moment I touched a bag of beans, roasted them, and winnowed them, I was absolutely hooked.” Sam Ratto is the founder of Videri Chocolate in Raleigh, North Carolina. Videri is celebrating its 10th anniversary on December 15, and makes a full line of single origin and inclusion bars, as well as bonbons and other confections, and they also provide cacao in various forms for numerous b...

Sara Ratza at Ratza Chocolate in Tarpon Springs, Florida, loves craft beer almost as much as she loves chocolate, so working with neighboring breweries was always part of her plan. She recently provided cacao to Brighter Days Brewing , just a 5 minute walk from her shop, for a beer called Hooray for Hazel, a bourbon barrel-aged Imperial Stout brewed with hazelnuts, lactose, and cacao. In this quic...

“I use [chocolate tasting] as a bit of a yogic moment to find some peace and quiet and sit back and enjoy what I’m eating.” - Tyler Cagwin, Nostalgia Chocolate When I talk to chocolate makers or other chocolate professionals about the tasting experience, what drew them to chocolate, and what happens when they close their eyes with a piece of chocolate on their tongues, nostalgia is the word that c...

“The satyr is the fun-bringer, and that is really what we wanted the spirit of this place to be. A poetic hub of fun.” - Tobias Cichon, Rabid Brewing co-founder The large, hand-painted mural above the Rabid Brewing taproom in Homewood, Illinois, depicts a mythical origin story for beer in which fantastical creatures pour the golden elixir out for the denizens of this imaginary world.  Fantasy and...

How do we become better beer tasters and get better at describing the flavors in our beer? Natalya Watson is a Beer Sommelier and Advanced Cicerone® passionate about sharing her knowledge of beer with others because she believes that beer is simply too delicious to remain undiscovered. She’s the founder of Virtual Beer School , host of the ‘Beer with Nat’ podcast , and author of Beer: Taste the Ev...

“Chocolate acted as a central vehicle of women’s ritual power, and was a flashpoint for women’s disorderly behavior in public settings.” - Martha Few in her article “Chocolate, Sex, and Disorderly Women in Late 17th and Early 18th Century Guatemala” as quoted by Megan Giller Chocolate is a plant-based food or drink in which the main ingredient—the seed of a tropical tree—is ground and melted and m...

Need the perfect theme for your at-home beer tasting party with friends? I just published a full guide to hosting your own beer tasting at home on the Bean to Barstool blog, but the one thing I didn’t include was possible themes for your tasting. Listen to this super quick bonus episode for some great ideas to help you choose beer styles for your tasting event, and then read that full guide to hel...

It’s exciting for people to learn this history about women in brewing in Medieval Europe and feel like they’re part of a story, but I think it’s important that we’re telling the right story and the story that’s based on primary-source information. In recent years, associations have been made between depictions of Medieval alewives and our modern day image of witches, from pointy hats to cauldrons,...

This decadent Barrel-Aged Imperial Stout was brewed with Belize, Guatemala, and Mexico cacao from a beloved bean to bar chocolate maker. Weldwerks Brewing in Greeley, Colorado, recently partnered with Denver bean to bar chocolate maker Cultura Chocolate on a variant of their legendary Medianoche Imperial Stout that’s all about the chocolate. Double Chocolate Medianoche was aged for 24 months in 5-...

“As long as I have my mind and memories and a chocolate, I can go wherever I want.” - Chocolate educator Sanna Forslund Our senses are made of magic (driven by really cool science) and engaging our senses by tasting chocolate can transport us to other places and times, summon memories, evoke emotions, and provoke imagination.  Today’s guest is a chocolate educator who uses chocolate as a way to tr...

When you’re pairing beer and chocolate, you aren’t pairing a meal; you’re pairing a moment. So how do you make that moment the best it can be?  There are some special considerations when it comes to pairing craft beer and bean to bar chocolate, and in this episode I walk some of through those, offering tips on how to pair chocolate and beer. I also share some of my favorite beer and chocolate pair...

Our senses can be conduits of wonder, transporting us to places we’ve been before and places we’ve only dreamed of, connecting us to past versions of ourselves and to the other people around us. In this episode we talk about tasting good beer and good chocolate with all of our senses, a process that engages our memories, emotions, and imaginations as well. We discuss the process of tasting craft b...

What could be better for Father Day’s than bean to bar chocolate bonbon bars made with amazing craft beer? French Broad Chocolates in Asheville, North Carolina, has once again partnered with Asheville’s Burial Beer on a series of four “bean to bonbon” bars , and they’re as complex, elegant, and indulgent as the beers they’re made with. In today’s episode we talk about and taste through French Broa...

There are countless similarities between the worlds of craft beer and bean to bar chocolate, and few people know that as well as Scott Watson. Scott was a professional craft brewer in the 1990s when craft beer was just beginning to gain national attention. After leaving the craft beer world, he eventually discovered bean to bar chocolate and founded Loon Chocolate .  In today’s episode Scott share...

Honey bees are so cool. A honey bee worker lives for just 5 or 6 weeks during the summer, but in that time she’ll fly about 500 miles visiting 20,000 individual flowers. She’ll fly until her wings literally start to fail and fall off, and by the end of her life she’ll have made about a 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey.  There were several beverages in antiquity that were fermented from honey, many of w...

Maple is intimately tied to life in eastern North America, and in today’s episode, you’ll hear from Canadian and American bean to bar chocolate makers and American craft brewers who use maple sap, sugar, and syrup local to their areas in thoughtful, nuanced chocolates and beers. All of them had memories that tied the flavor of maple into the stories of their lives, and in this episode you’ll hear...

In this episode we explore the flavor of wood and other tree ingredients in bean to bar chocolate and craft beer. So many evocative flavors and aromas come from trees without us really thinking about them that way. Cinnamon is a tree bark. Maple syrup comes from tree sap. In the adult beverage world, the quinine that gives bitterness to tonic water and the angostura that flavors the eponymous bitt...

In this episode, we talk with Xoco by Corina, a Norwegian bean to bar maker who is partnering with Lervig Beer, a prominent Norwegian craft brewery, to create 3 Bean Stout Chocolate, a 70% dark chocolate bar that is perhaps more evocative of the Amazon than the Arctic, but nonetheless demonstrates the tapestry of influences that make beer and chocolate so exciting. Check out David's book Pair...

In the Cincinnati neighborhood of Over the Rhine—an enclave that housed much of the city’s German population in the 19th century and served as the de facto brewery district—Maverick Chocolate is working with breweries in the city’s thriving craft beer scene to provide cacao for a range of beers. The most recent example is Black Forest Gateau, a strong and elegant Imperial Stout brewed at the Sam A...

Every aroma or flavor we identify in beer or chocolate or some other food or drink is something we learned at some point, and that personal vocabulary is based upon where we grew up, our cultural background, and a host of other influences. As craft beer works to be more inclusive, the language we use to describe beer needs to be examined and opened up to new influences. In this episode I talk with...

Springdale Beer in Framingham, Massachusetts, recently partnered with Taza Chocolate in Somerville, Massachusetts, for a special variant of their Brig Mocha Stout brewed with Öko Caribe cacao from the Dominican Republic and Red Barn coffee. Listen to this quick bonus episode to learn more about the beer! Check out David's book Pairing Beer & Chocolate: A Guide to Bringing the Flavors of C...