Trend spotting at this year’s Great American Beer Festival revealed swelling ranks of brewers using coffee and chocolate as key beer flavoring ingredients. The Herb and Spice or Chocolate Beer category was up 13 entries, reaching 85 beers at the 2009 GABF (fifth largest out of 78 categories) and the Coffee Flavored Beer category had 45 entries, up 17 from 2008. To put these numbers in perspective, Scottish-Style Ale had 29 entries, Vienna-Style Lager had 25 entries and Classic Irish-Style Dry Stout had 19 entries.

While GABF award entries are by no means an empirical measure of a category’s growth, they do provide insight into what brewers are producing and what medals they would like to win. Coffee and chocolate flavor notes are nothing new to brewers, who have roasted barley to bring out these tastes in grains for centuries. Just a sip of Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout—which does not contain any cocoa—will show you what is possible for a skilled brewer. Mankind’s fixation with coffee and chocolate have paralleled beer over the ages, with the flavors usually reserved for different times of the day—breakfast—or different parts of the meal—dessert. Now brewers are marrying the flavors with beer and the results are pretty outstanding.

Consumers are embracing the idea of fifth ingredients more and more in the beers they drink,” says Chris Rafferty, brewmaster at Rock Bottom Brewery in Arlington, VA. The brewery’s “Dude! Where’s My Vespa?” coffee-flavored brew won GABF gold in 2009. Rafferty believes that the growth in fruit beers may have reached its zenith and increased awareness of Belgian ales means that consumers are much more willing to try beers with spices and other non-traditional flavoring agents, such as coffee and chocolate.

Getting fresh-roasted beans made all the difference in the world with this beer,” says Rafferty. “We let the beans gas off for three days after roasting and use a coarse grind.” The brew starts off using the brewpub’s oatmeal stout recipe as its base. At 16.8 Plato and 6.8 percent alcohol by volume, it’s higher gravity than most oatmeal stouts. The bar serves the oatmeal stout on nitrogen, while the coffee version is either doled out on carbon dioxide or from a cask just to be different, according to Rafferty.

Dark Roast

Like any added ingredient, coffee offers a fair bit of challenges. You have to tweak the recipe to get it where you want it,” says Omar Ansari, president of Surly Brewing in Minnesota. “It’s not a subtle coffee note in our beer, it’s prominent. That’s what we wanted.” How dominant you want the coffee to be depends a lot on how the bean is roasted. Surly Coffee Bender adds Guatemalan beans to the recipe of Surly’s Bender, an oatmeal brown ale.

Oakshire Brewing in Eugene, OR, makes the award-winning Overcast Oatmeal Stout by infusing it with organic coffee roasted by the local Wandering Goat Coffee Co. It takes 13 hours to extract the flavor through a cold water steeping process.

Oregon is a mature craft beer market,” says Matt Van Wyk, the brewer at Oakshire. “People’s palates are becoming more and more accustomed to fuller-flavored beers. And there is a group of people out there who want more flavor, but are not necessarily hop heads.”

At Oakshire the quest for more flavor pointed in the direction of coffee. “The ingredients are changing the way people are thinking of beer. They are realizing there is more than just sweet and bitter,” says Van Wyk, who has brewed with both coffee and chocolate during his career. He says chocolate offers a range of flavors that can be quite subtle, while coffee allows a brewer to dial up a big aroma.

Shenandoah Chocolate Donut Beer is made using what brewery owner Anning Smith will only say are “secret ingredients.” The stout was born out of an observation Smith made watching a bartender mix the brewery’s original rye donut beer with a stout. The brewers at the Alexandria, VA, brewery went to work on making a chocolate donut-flavored brew.

We wanted to create something that was sweet, creamy and full-bodied,” Smith says. The 6.5 percent stout is available year round and has attracted quite a bit of attention for the small brewery.

Hawaii’s Kona Brewing Co. relied on world famous Kona coffee to make its Kona Pipeline Porter. According to Rich Tucciarone, the brewery makes the beer for about six months of the year and has been increasing production by about 15 percent annually since introducing the beer in 2006.

Kona is smoother drinking, with less astringency than most coffees,” Tucciarone says. “We wanted the coffee aroma to come through clearly, but we did not want the 3 a.m. diner coffee flavor.”

Larry Sidor, brewmaster at Deschutes Brewery in Bend, OR, says he is happy the brewery had an intern when it came time to clean out the tank after using a 1,000 pounds of coffee in brewing its limited edition anniversary Deschutes Double Black Butte Porter XXI. The beer is based off of Deschutes Black Butte Porter and has coffee and cocoa nibs added to the recipe, plus 20 percent of the brew is aged in ex-Bourbon barrels.

Whenever we make a coffee or a chocolate beer, people just ask for them,” Sidor says. “When you marry good coffee and chocolate to an exceptional beer it reaches out to our customers and intrigues them. It’s really not much of a stretch for a consumer who likes a big beer like an imperial stout to really find they like beers with chocolate or coffee.”

With the cold weather months upon us and thoughts turning to heartier brews, your next beer might just be something that delivers a jolt of caffeine.

Not surprisingly, adventurous brewers are finding a way to include cocoa and chocolate in some of their more inspired recipes. Dogfish Head’s Theobroma (named for the cocoa plant genus) is reverent homage to Mesoamerican culture by madcap artisan Sam Calagione. Sexual Chocolate Imperial Stout from Foothills Brewing Winston-Salem, NC, is one of the most coveted and scrumptuous brews in the South. Few beers accompany a chocolately dessert better than Young’s Double Chocolate Stout or Rogue Chocolate Stout. Beer and chocolate pairings are divine in their own right, but the marriage in the brewery is equally transcendent and rewarding.

There are a couple of considerations when using cocoa in homebrewing. One, cocoa is not a timid contributor, so tread lightly. Two, not all brews will stand up to the intense flavors that cocoa offers. In fact, the character and nuance is not unlike that of dark grains like chocolate malt, black patent malt or roasted barley.

The very descriptions of robust and Baltic porter, all versions of stout, and even brown ale often sound just a chocolate confection: bittersweet chocolate, cocoa, mocha and malted milk are frequent descriptors in reviews. The similarities between the two media are uncanny and, at times, downright sublime.

Cocoa also blends superbly with malty flavors, honey (especially orange blossom), fruit (cherry), extracts (vanilla and hazelnut) and, for real historical cocoa authenticity, spices (cinnamon and hot chili peppers or powder). From that list, it should be easy to come up with a themed combination or a simple cocoa brew provided you stay within a reasonable margin of adventure. Really though, the possibilities are limited to your own imagination. Any savvy brewer knows that experimentation is part of why we do this thing of ours, but well-laid plans are always better. Back off on the dark malts at the same rate at which you add the cocoa and the results should be favorable.

Cocoa Basics

Essentially, cocoa can be delivered in four different forms: chocolate syrup, cocoa powder, bar chocolate and cocoa nibs. All four forms are relatively trouble-free and can be used at different junctures of the brewing process.

Commercial chocolate syrup is both an easy and effective way to get the cocoa goodness into a beer, and not only is it fat-free (advantageous for brewing), but already sterile. Pour a 12-ounce can directly into the primary or secondary fermenter prior to racking. It readily dissolves and the sugar will ferment away. Brewing legend says that the secondary is best for aromatic retention. Hershey’s makes both a regular and special dark version of their famous syrup: both work excellently, are convenient, and can even be used to prime, at a rate of about one cup per five gallons.

If you are interested in making your own syrup from cocoa powder, which is quite simple and quite versatile in the kitchen, refer to the recipe below. It will deliver a concentrated, mellow chocolate flavor. Light and dark Dutch-processed cocoa powder, even in organic form, can be purchased on the Internet from numerous sources (My choice is www.cocoasupply.com).

Cocoa powders can also be used directly, but bear in mind that their high fat content makes them harder to dissolve directly in the kettle than prepared syrups and, depending on the variety, can impart harshness. They are nothing more than pulverized raw or roasted cocoa beans. Dutch-processed cocoa is mellower than natural cocoa powder, and is the better option for experimentation and tweaking.

Cocoa powders are perfect for mashing, where they can be evenly distributed without problems and still find their way into the kettle. Start with about two to three ounces in a five-gallon recipe and work your way up―you can always augment later with syrup if desired.

Chocolate or cocoa bars will need to be melted before adding to the kettle to avoid scorching. Baker’s chocolate, which is unsweetened, and bulk chocolate bars, sweetened for ready consumption, can be equally useful. They should be dissolved in a small amount of hot wort prior to use.

This brings us to cocoa nibs, the most raw, and hence, most intense of cocoa products. Nibs are essentially crushed cocoa beans that are either raw or slightly roasted. Raw nibs are lighter in color and don’t have the burnt edge that roasted nibs do, so pick your appropriate confection. Taste them before using and trust your instincts, which is often the homebrewers’ best directive. Raw nibs would fold nicely into a brown ale or porter, with the roasted nibs more at home in a stout. Each unaltered nugget is roughly the size of a barleycorn. They can be used directly in the mash, the boil, or suspended in conditioning beer like hops or spices.

As they are the precursor to cocoa powder, nib character is just as concentrated and powerful, and should be used with restraint. Three ounces in a five-gallon batch is a good starting point. To get maximum effect in the mash or kettle, mill them as you would your grain. I have found that the flavor is fully extracted in the mash, adding another roasted dimension to the brew. If used in conditioning beer, simply fill a small mesh sachet with the desired amount and suspend in the beer with a string. Since the extraction will be lower and mellower than if it is mashed or boiled, you will find that this approach will give a softer edge to the finished beer. Nibs are this brewer’s preferred choice for most brewing additions, as they are relatively unaltered, and can be sampled in their natural state prior to use.

The Tokyo tasting was a small affair managed by my friend, Bryan Harrell, a writer living in that city (www.bento.com/brews.html), with and for the benefit of his beer enthusiast friends. There were two of these groups. The Tokyo Good Beer Club is a consumer group (www.goodbeerclub.org) composed of Japanese beer enthusiasts and homebrewers with just a few foreign residents (all of whom spoke Japanese fairly well). Most of the Japanese present spoke some English. Although Harrell translated for me, I had no trouble communicating with most of them. There was also the Tokyo Beer Research Club (mostly Japanese), a group with a much greater knowledge of beer than the first. There were 30 participants, including 5 women.

Bakushu Club Popeye

This is Japan’s best beer pub. They have 40 beers on tap―23 of them ji-beer (or ji-biiru, Japanese craft beer) of the approximately 250 craft beers in Japan, plus Asahi Stout and two on cask! That’s an impressive selection for such a small place. Prices average Y935 for a standard US pint (about $8.40). There’s also Rogue’s Brutal Bitter, Shakespeare Stout and Old Crustacean Barleywine; Hair of the Dog Fred and Ruth (USA); Erdinger Hefe-Weizen, Jever Pils, Kostrizer Schwartz (Germany); Abbot Ale (United Kingdom); Hoegaarden White (Belgium); and Murphy’s Stout (Ireland). Popeye’s owner, Tatsuo Aoki, told us that in the mid-1990s his bar was doing just so-so until he added ji-beer and Belgian beers to his menu. That’s when things turned around for him.

A couple of months earlier, I had sent Harrell a list of beer styles and chocolate types I would need. To save money, we limited ourselves to seven combinations, still an expensive list by any standard. Harrell had the “Rules of Chocolate” translated into Japanese for the occasion, and they were very well received.

I went to Popeye’s the night before to meet with Harrell and firm out details with Mr. Aoki. The tastings were 150 milliliters, or 5 ounces, in size.

In 1989, I suggested to Carl Simpson, owner with Kate Bullard of Portland’s (OR) Dublin Pub, that we do chocolate and beer for my February tasting there, since it fell on Valentines Day. Carl agreed, but he must have had his doubts, and in truth I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Indeed, I was forced to consider the question, why would anyone even think of such a bizarre combination? The answer is simplicity itself: because there is beer and there is chocolate. A marriage made in heaven, as it were. It had all started the year before when I was trying to devise ways to twist the IRS’s tail. What better way than deducting some chocolate from my taxes. I kept careful notes, of course—the IRS can be fussy.

I didn’t want to be the only arbiter of which beer would go with which chocolate, so I declared it a Chefs’ and Brewers’ Choice Chocolate and Beer Tasting, and called on local brewers for help. I pressed them for combinations of chocolate with their beer. Next I approached a couple of local Portland chefs, but it was Greg Higgins, executive chef at Heathman Hotel, who added the stroke of genius that has made me famous in beer and brewing circles. Greg suggested a stout float made with chocolate fudge brownies, vanilla ice cream, and Guinness stout. If left to my own devices, I would never have had the courage to try that.

The beers were ready, and the chocolate was, too. Although the crowd was fairly large, only a few hardy souls actually participated in that first tasting, but they made up for their numbers with their enthusiasm.

I next tried the idea in Houston at the Dixie Cup Homebrew Competition. It was different there; we had a captive audience. A hundred beer judges who had sat all afternoon and evening judging beer and were in no shape to be critical. More important, they were too drunk to drive home.

Since then, I have done similar tastings at venues across the country and in London and Tokyo as well. I have become quite well known in those circles for such madness. Although it was Michael Jackson who invented the beer dinner (one or more different beers served with each different course), I am having great fun with my format.

As I continued my research, I realized there was a lot more to the beer-chocolate idea than was on the surface. Perhaps I was becoming a Brewchocoholic! If so, there were sinister lupulin undertones to consider, and it was soon necessary to increase my swimming time to burn off all those dark calories.

The Beers

Normally, it is just about impossible to use the beers of only one brewery in a beer and chocolate tasting. Very few breweries have the necessary six to 10 darker, heavier and diverse brews to pair well with chocolate. Pale beers are not too useful for that purpose, and neither are hoppy ones.

One needs bocks; doppelbocks; brown ales; rich, dark Munich beers; Bavarian weizens and weizenbocks; schwarzbiers; stouts; Scottish ales and barley wine style ales. Belgian fruit ales, pale ales, abbey style ales (dubbels and tripels), and French biere de gardes also work well with chocolate.

That’s a substantial list. As one might imagine, it is rare to find a brewery with the minimum six such diverse beers in its repertoire in the same season of the year.

For Rogue, however, it was no problem at all.

Rogue is one of the very few breweries in the country that could manage such a diverse selection of distinguished beers. In fact I can think of no other US, British or German brewery that could pull off such a feat during any season. Just for the record, let me note that the Rogue brewery pub (located in the very center of the large industrial brewing plant in Newport) regularly has no fewer than 24 different beers of the brewery’s own brewing. Twenty-four! From one brewery! All on tap at once!

I had no difficulties getting the six in which I was interested put on tap in the Issaquah location in time for my tasting. These were:

• Rogue Mocha Porter, World Beer Cup silver medal winner, and a well-made porter that tastes like it has coffee in it, although it actually has none;

• Hazelnut Brown Nectar, a well-done brown ale with a modest dollop of hazelnut extract on the finish, giving it a rich, elegant flavor profile;

• McRogue Scotch Ale, a splendid, full-bodied strong ale made to be drunk with chocolate⎯no doubt of that;

• Shakespeare Stout, a fine, dry oatmeal stout just made for a chocolate match;

• Old Crustacean Barleywine, one of my all-time favorite barley wines and one demanding⎯yes, demanding!⎯a chocolate fix to match its fullness; and

• Russian Imperial Stout, Rogue’s new World Beer Cup gold medal, a beer that Empress Catherine would surely have drooled over, and one for which I had planned a special mission in this tasting.

The Chocolates

By the time I had settled on the beers, I began to think about the chocolate match for such a wonderful list. Normally, the hosts of my various beer and chocolate tastings are looking for some relatively cheap chocolates to serve at the event. (Won’t just any chocolate do?) Most people singularly fail to understand that the world of chocolate is at least as complicated as the world of craft beer. And anyway, I knew what I wanted in chocolate, even before I picked the beer.

This tasting demanded Issaquah’s own wonderful Boehms Chocolate, which company is located very near the brewpub. I had known founder Julius Boehm, and I wanted his chocolates and his alone for this tasting.

I had met Julius years earlier, when he was 50 and I was 21. We taught swimming together; he was a volunteer teacher, and I worked for the Red Cross in that area during the late 40s. I had learned to love his rocky road chocolate (with marshmallows). It was so delicious that I became addicted. He died in 1981, at age 84, but not before raising money to build a swimming pool for the town. The pool is named after him.

His memory is well served in Issaquah. I couldn’t imagine having a beer and chocolate tasting in that town without using Julius Boehm’s chocolates.

With that in mind, I set up a meeting with Bernard Garbusjuk, current owner, to select chocolates that would match these fine beers. The first and last beers on the list I set aside⎯the Mocha Porter to match with chocolate chip cookies, a must in my chocolate-beer tastings; and the Rogue Imperial Stout saved for another “must,” the vanilla ice cream stout float with which I usually end such tastings.

That left four beers to pair with first-class chocolate accompaniments. The very dry Shakespeare Stout was easiest. Bernard had a basic bittersweet chocolate that simply had to be paired with the dry stout. It’s a Boehms specialty, from rare Criollo beans harvested only in the high mountains of Venezuela and on small plantations around South American chocolate country. These small chocolate discs are distinctive, with earthy undertones and characteristic fruity and floral notes. They seemed made just for this particular stout.

Bernard and I made these selections at 9:00 on the morning of my tasting. We sipped beers and nibbled chocolate pieces in a most decadent fashion as we wandered across the beer list and possible chocolate choices. Early on we sampled some four hazelnut/chocolate combinations to find a match for the Rogue Hazelnut Brown Nectar. We settled on a lovely gold-foil wrapped, dark and milk chocolate layered, hazelnut flavored giandujia (from Italian, pronounced soft-J as Jiandooya) truffle square. It was perfect for the brown ale.

The McRogue Scotch was willing to go with any chocolate. Narrowing that list to one was impossible. We finally limited it to two. The McRogue is one of those beers that demand attention at 17.6 percent fermentable extract at original gravity; it boasts a cuddly 7.4 percent alcohol by volume (abv). Boehms Encore Orange Chocolate Truffle Square seemed to fit perfectly; but then Bernard brought out his Boehms Scotch Treat, a lovely butterscotch peanut-butter almond in a white chocolate dip. We had to use both these items. Gawd, how did I ever survive that morning?

Rogue Old Crustacean was still waiting for recognition. A barley wine style ale, at no less than 26 percent fermentables and 11 percent abv; that beer demanded something strong, gooey, and excessively sweet. I knew what I wanted, even though Bernard was a little nonplused at my choice. Old Crusty needed Boehms milk chocolate rocky road to sleep with. That proved to be a fine pairing, a favorite of the audience, that night at the tasting, although it was the Imperial Stout, another 26-degree beer with 11.5 percent abv, in a stout float that won the hearts of the audience as the evening’s best.

Bernard had done many chocolate-wine tastings, but he told me that chocolate and beer was a much better wedding. I already knew that.