Drink Craft Beer, Eat Craft Chocolate

A few months ago, Jeff happened to stop by the Wine Gallery in Brookline when there was a tasting of Taza Chocolate paired with wine. He got to talking with the representative from Taza who was there, and loved the story of the company: they're traditional, organic, fair trade and work directly with small co-ops in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. After he tried the chocolate/wine pairings, one thought struck him... This chocolate would go amazingly with beer! It's less sweet, has fruity notes and is more raw. Wine isn't the best pairing, beer is! This, in turn, is what brought us to Somerville to speak with Alex Whitmore, the head chocolate maker at Taza Chocolates. 

We found out about how Taza Chocolate is made. Quite an amazing process, they have control of the process from bean to chocolate. The process is pretty interesting (especially when chocolate is in the air all around you). Surprisingly, it's very close to brewing as well! Winnowing and milling are similar. Then it's ground and put into a kettle. It's processed in the kettle for a while. There's piping moving the chocolate. Temperatures are important. This tour really showed us how making good artisan food and drink are quite similar in the care devotion you have to put into it. Check out the full "how it's made" feature on the right. After the tour, we sat down with Alex to really find out more about Taza, what drove him to start the company and, most importantly, taste some beer!

DCB: How did you decide this is how you wanted to make your chocolate?

Alex: Basically the idea behind the company is to make a kind of chocolate that isn’t made in this part of the world. In Mexico there’s a tradition of drinking chocolate they way we drink coffee. Down there’s there are places with mills all over the place and you can bring in ingredients and they can grind for you and give you the cocoa so you can go home and make your chocolate drink. And every family will have their own recipe. Sometimes people will add cinnamon or almonds if they are wealthy. I saw this and it blew me away. That’s one of the reasons why I started this company and I wanted to incorporate these mills into the company. They do very minimally refine the chocolate, it’s not a very highly refined European style; even in the bars which we refine using the granite stone roller mills, which we can dial in so they are really close and really tight. The chocolate cycles through the rollers for about five hours to refine the particle size of the sugar to where we want. It passing through the air kind of helps release some intense acids that are remnants of the fermentation process. I didn’t talk much about the stuff that goes on at the farm, but the fermentation of the bean on the farm is very important. We like those acids, they’re precursors to the final flavor but we want to release some of the less desirable ones. Very similar to conching, which we don’t do, it’s a traditional part of the European way that we don’t do (Conching is a process where the chocolate is put through a container containing metal beads which break down the sugar particles from anywhere between 4 and 72 hours). The whole point is to minimally refine the bean, we lightly roast and keep a lot of the natural tropical flavors of the bean.

Anyways…I want to drink some beer.

DCB: Alright let's do it. So what we did is took some beers that we thought would go well... but you know chocolate.

Alex: I hate it when people pair port with chocolate and the flavor is sweet and the chocolate is sweet and it’s too much sweet.

DCB: That’s what’s fun about beer, there’s so many flavors so we’ve got a little bit of sweet, some roasty flavors all sorts.

Alex: This is fun, I’m into this! I love food in general.

So our tasting commenced! We ran through a number of beers some great some not so great. What we have to share with you now is the results of our tasting with Alex. We have what we believe are some fantastic beer and chocolate pairings where we felt the chocolate and beer truly worked together to bring out new flavors in both.

Before we go on to the tasting notes, let us say an article like this is great to read about, but we wanted to do something special this time. For those in the Boston area, we’ll be hosting a tasting of all the beers mentioned in this article at The Wine Gallery in Brookline, MA (on Route 9, right near the Brookline Hills T Stop of the D branch of the Green Line). We’ll be pouring samples of each beer along with samples of each of the chocolates on Thursday February 7^th from 5-7pm (a week before Valentine's Day). For those that can’t make it down check out Taza’s website at http://www.tazachocolate.com/shop.php and order a bar or two to try yourself.

Without further ado…the beer…and chocolate.

Taza makes four types of chocolate, three of which are the same recipe with varying percentages of cacao:  a 60%, 70% and 80% cacao bar. The other is their Mexicano, which is a Mexican style drinking chocolate made with cinnamon. Because the chilled beer can mess up the texture of the chocolate if you're not careful, there's a certain way you'll want to try these pairings. Make sure you let the chocolate melt in your mouth before you drink the beer. Otherwise the temperature will cause it get a little chalky and you'll miss the great flavors than can come out. Also, letting the chocolate warm up is similar to beer, this is when all the volatiles come out. This will allow you to taste the berry, almond and other flavors that are left in because of the process that Taza employs to make their artisan chocolate.

Hoppin' Frog B.O.R.I.S. the Crusher Imperial Stout with Taza 60% Cacao Chocolate
We set out thinking this would be the perfect pairing with the 70% chocolate, but this is where having Alex from Taza around really helped. The 60% proved a much better pairing with this beer. The beer is deep, viscous and rich with heavy roasty flavors and dark malt tones. Pair this with some of the sweeter 60% Taza bar and, after a sip, the roastiness transitions into a brilliant smooth chocolate mocha. The finish of this beer becomes a roller coaster of rich flavors finishing with the smooth sweetness of the Taza 60% Chocolate

BBC Coffeehouse Porter with Taza 70% Cacao Chocolate
BBC Coffeehouse Porter has always been a favorite of ours and the 70% chocolate proved to be one of our favorites from Taza. Pairing the two just seemed to make sense. The BBC Coffeehouse Porter offers a smooth fairly light mouth-feel with light mocha notes and a roasty coffee finish that’s a result of cold pressed Dean’s Bean’s coffee being added to the beer. Alex found this to be one of his favorite beers of the tasting. The combination of these two essentially enhances the flavors in each. The 70% chocolate is a bit less sweet than the 60% and has some deeper roasty flavors. Combining this beer and chocolate gives you a rich mocha porter flavor that each product by itself just doesn’t deliver. We can’t see anyone not liking this pairing.

Verhaeghe Echt KriekenBier with Taza 80% Cacao Chocolate
This is Taza’s darkest chocolate and it’s quite different from anything we’ve ever had. The chocolate itself has a slight sourness, complex roasty tones, slight berry and almont notes with a very unique light sweetness. We knew we had to find a beer that not only stood up to the chocolate but played off these flavors to give you something exciting. Echt Kriekenbier proved to do just that. A traditional Flemish sour ale fermented with cherries, it has vanilla and brandy tones along with the sour cherry taste. Local sour cherries are added to this beer while it’s aging and the final beer in the bottle is a mix of various aged version of the beer. The combination of Taza 80% and Echt Kriekenbier is a sublime chocolate covered cherry sensation. We’re openly not huge fans of fruit beer but we were careful to choose a beer that wasn’t just any fruit beer. This beer is fantastically complex and when paired with the chocolate turns into a decadent dessert. The KriekenBier definitely serves to mellow some of the harsher flavors in the 80%, while the chocolate is a fine counterpoint to the sourness of the beer. Pairing these two provides a definitely different experience than either one alone.

Stone Smoked Porter with Taza Chocolate Mexicano
The Chocolate Mexicano was our other favorite from Taza. Made only with Mexican stone mills (molinos), this chocolate is very simple and is made with roasted cocoa beans, cane sugar, and cinnamon stick. The cinnamon used is incredible as we got to sample some at the factory. This was Alex’s favorite pairing, and ours as well. 

The Chocolate Mexicano can be whipped into milk or water to create Taza de Chocolate Mexicano (try this, it’s amazing), or eaten as is. This chocolate has a very different texture than any other you’ve most likely tried. It’s processed less so the sugar is a bit grittier and it melts in your mouth differently than most other chocolates. It's also the sweetest of the Taza portfolio. The subtle cinnamon notes provide a smooth spice that begged to be brought out by a good beer. We had a hunch the mild smoke flavor found in Stone’s Smoked Porter would accomplish that, and we were right. 

The Stone Smoked Porter has just a hint of smoke which is why this beer works. Many smoked beers suffer from an overwhelming smoke aroma or taste, but here’s it’s part of a broader flavor profile. The pairing with the chocolate brings out the spiciness of the cinnamon while the roasted malt in the porter helps to balance the sweetness of the chocolate. The end result is a smooth rich experience unlike any other pairing we’ve done.

Good food and good beer belong together and we hope this article has helped you think a little bit differently about what both chocolate and beer can be and how they can work together. We had a blast putting this together for you all and we hope those of you nearby can come taste each pairing for yourself. We want to give special thanks to Alex Whitmore from Taza Chocolate and The Wine Gallery in Brookline, MA. For those who can't attend, everything in this article can be purchased at Wine Gallery in Brookline or Kenmore Square (Wine-Gallery.com ), and the chocolate can be purchased online from Taza's website (http://www.tazachocolate.com/shop.php). Until next time! 

Cheers, 

Devon and Jeff

Taza - How It's Made

First, it starts in places like Costa Rica or the Dominican Republic where Alex and his partner buy the cocoa beans straight from small farmer co-ops at above fair trade prices. This allows them to maintain a distinct flavor profile, as the regional terroir of the beans is maintained. The beans are lightly roasted to preserve flavor. Cocoa beans, after all, are a tropical fruit, and they have a flavor indicative of that before roasting. Taza's beans are actually roasted right in Jamaica Plain, MA using J.P. Lick's coffee roaster (the roast their own coffee, so Taza uses the machine when coffee isn't being roasted).

From here, the beans are put through a winnowing machine. This separates the chaff (the shell of the bean) from the nib. The chaff is a by-product that is either sold to tea companies or given away as mulch to community groups (we made some tea with the chaff, and it's amazing! Nice cocoa aroma and a good earthy flavor). The nib is collected and then put through Molinos, which are the Mexican stone mills that Taza uses. They reconditioned the mills, shipped them up to Somerville from Mexico and rebuilt them. The nibs are dumped into the Molinos and, if you’re using any vanilla or any cinnamon in the recipe, you grind it right through the mill. It gets completely pulverized with the nib. The way it works is there’s two stones with one that rotates. The product gets run between the two and it’s like a thousand scissors shearing the particle size down and then it shoots out the edge of the stone. It’s flowing liquid at that point. Most people think it’s going to be powdery but it’s not. Just like if you imagine grinding peanuts into peanut butter it’s the same thing. It’s a very oily seed, the cocoa bean. The grinding releases all the oils and shatter the cellular structure. This cocoa liquor (it’s what the industry calls ground up winnowed cocoa beans) is collected into buckets and dumped it into the chocolate tank. In their 300 lb chocolate tank they mix in the sugar. Of course, they use only organic cane sugar which is has a golden color with a natural flavor. All of their ingredients are organic. Once the sugar is mixed in, you start calling it chocolate. The sugar is then refined within the liquor as it passes through rollers. This finished chocolate is then tempered, put into molds, chilled and wrapped by hand. They make 600 lbs of chocolate this way, not including the Mexicano, which is ground using a different process.

Alex goes on to tell us about the next steps: 

"Once the particle size is down to the level where we want it to be it’s done. We then add any additional cocoa butter. We don’t use very much here, just a little to reduce the viscosity a little bit to make it more normal to people’s mouth feel.

We then pump our chocolate and pump it into the tempering tank. You ever open a chocolate bar and see a white sheen on top? That means the chocolate is not in temper and the cocoa butter has separated. It's still fine to eat but the texture might be a little off and it’s not that pretty. This machine takes the chocolate and promotes it’s crystallization and solidification. If you were to just melt chocolate and let it cool at room temperature it would be bendy, it wouldn’t have a good snap and it wouldn’t have a pretty glossy finish on it. That’s because chocolate is polymorphous, one of the many issues with working with chocolate. [The tempering machine] takes the chocolate to about 150 degrees then down to about 85 then back up to about 90-95 degrees.

The chocolate is done at this point, poured into molds and cooled to be hand wrapped by our wrapping team."

Taza offers four different chocolates: