Craft Chocolate x Craft Beer Pairings With Gilman Brewing

May 30, 2024 by Christina Dimacali

Two veterinary surgeons and a musician walk into a bar. Turns out they own the place. In Berkeley, just next door to 924 Gilman (the historic non-profit music venue), Gilman Brewing Company has been making and serving craft beer since 2015. When we thought about coming up with some craft chocolate and craft beer pairings, Christina immediately thought of our friends at Gilman. Fortunately, they were glad to join forces.

The goal of any pairing isn’t necessarily to match flavors, as much as it is to enhance or complement the flavors of individual elements. If you taste our 70% Maya Mountain, Belize bar and think “strawberry cheesecake,” could a lager with malty notes work alongside this fruit-forward chocolate? It may not sound like an obvious combination, and yet it has all the trappings of a delicious pairing. Meet Solamente Uno. This crisp Mexican-style amber lager has a hint of rye spice and a slight floral aroma from a light, dry hop. The malty, toasty notes of Solamente Uno complement the fruity Madagascar chocolate, almost like a light graham crust on a strawberry cheesecake.

The craft industry is an enthusiastic lot, and our commonalities around small-batch principles give us much to discuss. A note of gratitude goes to Gilman Brewing Owner and Founder Sean Wells and Head Brewer/Brewery Manager J.C. Nelson for helping make this collab happen. Before heading to Gilman, Christina selected single-origin bars representing a range of flavor profiles, as well as different gradations of fruity and herbaceous notes. She brought ten bars in all, including an extra-dark one, which we’ll get to below — and Gilman had even more varieties of beer on tap.

Christina sat down with Events Manager Michael Foulk and Taproom Managers Nora Burger and Ryan Forge. They started by tasting a chocolate bar, discussing its flavor notes, and then pulling draft samples of beers they thought might work well with that chocolate. If you’re contemplating tastings or pairings at home, here’s our recommended approach:

Step 1: The First Melt

Bite a square of chocolate into smaller bits, and wait a few seconds for the chocolate to soften and melt.

Step 2: Identify Flavors

Move the chocolate around. What do you taste first? Fudgy, fruity, nutty, or creamy flavors? Do the flavors evolve or linger?

Step 3: Consider and Compare

For each beer you taste, consider how its flavors complement or build on those in the chocolate. In between tastings, cleanse your palate with a sip of room-temperature water.

Nora found that the 70% Semuliki Forest, Uganda chocolate — with tasting notes of honey mango, crème fraîche, and cocoa powder — paired nicely with one particular Gilman IPA: the Montana Single Hop IPA. This beer, featuring a proprietary hop (Ahhroma) from Montana’s Glacier Ranch, exhibits some lovely tropical notes, including mango and pineapple, with a super-dry malt backbone from Gambrinus IPA malt. The dry crisp malt flavor of the beer keeps the juicy notes in check and provides a refreshing balance to the natural fruitiness of Semuliki Forest cocoa.

For an extra-dark pairing, Christina chose 85% Costa Esmeraldas, Ecuador chocolate. The 2022 harvest, from which this bar was made, has tasting notes of dark chocolate, pomelo, and clotted cream. At our factory, Eric enhanced the beans’ rich, chocolatey notes with a longer than usual conche time. Christina and Michael tried a handful of beers and found that the Pushrod Porter worked especially well alongside the darker bar. The medium-bodied, ruby-brown porter has notes of toasted malt, which bring out the bar’s creamy, dark chocolate flavors.

The final pairing spotlights 70% Kokoa Kamili, Tanzania chocolate. Nate roasted the 2021 harvest at a low temperature, which brought out the bar’s characteristic tangy-fruity notes of kiwi, crème fraîche, and honeysuckle. The team found a fitting companion in a juicy West Coast IPA: Frog on Bicycle. This beer is smooth and light with a clean, hoppy finish (thanks to hop varieties Motueka, Mosaic, and Simcoe). It is tropical and citrusy, which plays up the tang of the Kokoa Kamili bar.

There you have it. A summary of the craft chocolate x craft beer pairings we landed on:

70% Maya Mountain, Belize, 2022 Harvest, Batch 2 (tasting notes: fresh strawberry, honey, cheesecake) x Solamente Uno (crisp Mexican-style amber lager with malty, toasty notes)
70% Semuliki Forest, Uganda, 2022 Harvest, Batch 2 (tasting notes: honey mango, crème fraîche, cocoa powder) x The Montana Single Hop IPA (American IPA with tropical notes and a super-dry malt backbone)
85% Costa Esmeraldas, Ecuador, 2022 Harvest, Batch 1 (tasting notes: dark chocolate, pomelo, clotted cream) x Pushrod Porter (medium-bodied ruby-brown porter, with a toasted malt and lightly smoked flavor)
70% Kokoa Kamili, Tanzania, 2021 Harvest, Batch 1 (tasting notes: kiwi, crème fraîche, honeysuckle) x Frog on Bicycle, West Coast IPA (tropical and juicy, with a light crisp body)

We weren’t necessarily expecting each of these combinations — though any good pairing is the result of experimentation and discussion. Maybe this serves as a bit of inspiration for you to attempt your own craft chocolate and craft beer pairings at home? Should you give it a go, we’ll await word of your results.

If you’re wondering how a couple of veterinary orthopedic surgeons and a professional musician got into the brewing business, the story is this: Co-founder Tim Sellmeyer — one of the two vets — had a nectarine tree in his yard, and his dog used to get into the fruit. Nectarines, like chocolate, are not good for dogs (the stones in particular). So Tim knocked the nectarines down and found himself with a surplus of fruit. He ended up making a nectarine saison (a Belgian-style beer) and entering into a home brewing competition.

As one barrel led to another, Tim and fellow veterinary surgeon-and-brewer Sean Wells, along with their friend, musician John Schuman, opened Gilman Brewing in West Berkeley (they transformed an old automotive repair shop). Gilman Brewing has been awarded dozens of medals in both state and national craft beer competitions, and for good reason.

Thanks again to our friends at Gilman for hosting the pairing session. The next time you’re in Berkeley, consider paying them a visit for some beer and Detroit-style pizza. Dogs are allowed on the front patio — just keep them on leash. Gilman also has locations in Santa Cruz, Daly City, and Pleasanton.

Flavor in Chocolate: The Not-So-Secret Secrets Of Becoming A Great Taster

October 1, 2019 by Karen Cogan

Karen, our Flavor Manager, will openly and unapologetically tell you that she regularly eats chocolate for breakfast. She’s been a part of our team since 2013; first as a chocolate maker, then managing chocolate making, and now, managing flavor. In her current role, she gets to taste her way through the day as she helps build the systems and processes that encourage the development and preservation of our flavor.

This blog post is part one of a four-part series on flavor in chocolate. Karen will answer some of the most-asked questions around what we taste, how flavor happens, and how we as chocolate makers approach flavor in our process and in our bars.

We believe that chocolate is absolute magic. Becoming a great taster, however, is not.

As Flavor Manager since 2017, one of my absolute favorite things to do is to run our internal tasting training that we call Flavorientation. (And if you’re interested, we also offer a class in Tasting for the public.) Here I get the opportunity to meet each and every new taster in our growing team and use this unique moment to impart to them this one simple fact:

If you want to be a great taster, all you’ve got to do is practice.

In class, I keep the group size small, inviting no more than six people at a time to the table. This is purposefully done to create a safe space so that our new tasters can exercise this sometimes new and awkward-feeling muscle: the palate. I take them through a series of tasting exercises where I highlight the nuanced impact that both large and small changes in our raw product, production processes, and makers can have on the final flavor of a chocolate bar. I work hard to crack open the exciting world of flavor to our new team members.

As with any table full of new tasters, there is often at least one individual around the tasting table that says something like, “I’m terrible at tasting! I don’t taste a single thing that everyone else seems to be getting!”

If there is one piece of advice that I can give to anyone wanting to be a great taster, it would be to stop comparing yourself to those around you. I know, I know! That can be like asking some of you to stop writing with your dominant hand; awkward and unnatural. However, remember that comparison stifles your own experience and hinders your ability to practice pulling up your own unique aromatic memories buried deep within your consciousness.

Aromatic memories are, in large part, the things that breath life and brightness into your memories of that magical tropical vacation or the warm fuzzy feelings you have toward your favorite holiday. Aromatic memories can transport us miles in an instant with one whiff of the nostalgic.

This is what makes chocolate magical. Chocolate is known as one of the most aromatically complex things out there. The possible combinations of the chemical compounds within chocolate are essentially endless. Couple this with the fact that, unlike other craft industries like coffee or beer, chocolate, consumable by any age group, has typically woven itself into our earliest childhood memories. More often than not, understanding our connection to chocolate is so entangled within the story of our lives that it is near impossible to find its source.

This is one of the main reasons I absolutely love what I get to do here. I get to hear people’s life stories framed by their unique and deeply personal tasting notes. I get to literally hear them unpack some of their most potent experiences as they practice naming and identifying the aromas that have framed their lives.

Magic.

So next time you sit down to a meal, walk through your local farmers market, or step into your favorite relative’s kitchen, take a second and breathe deeply. These are the things your chocolate memories are made of!