Coffee, chocolate and beer #4: Caramel centred choc with chocolate stout

Time for another Pete Slosberg-inspired tasting. Take a caramel centered chocolate and pair with a chocolate stout. Is the result double the fun or twice as nasty?


Let's start with the beer - Young's Double Chocolate Stout . It certainly had good carbonation with an audible effervescence, its rocky head soon settling to an off-cream band.

There's obvious chocolate on the nose, but it's a curious dusty drinking chocolate. No, scrub that - it's liker a creamy hot chocolate gone cold. There's a lick of sweet chocolate too, like a syrup shot. Unsurprising, perhaps, given that it uses chocolate essence as a flavouring.

With little roast up front, the sweet chocolate taste is slightly cloying on the palate. Perhaps a chunk of chocolate would change things? I'd struggled to find anything vaguely artisanal so I'd settled for Cadbury's Dairy Milk with Caramel. It was surprisingly good - bit on the cold side but the caramel filling was soft and deep flavoured. The next slurp of beer was bitterer - the darker dry chocolate flavour now placed in sharp relief to the sustained sweetness of the caramel.

Then it all went a bit strange.... the chocolate got tastier, the beer weaker. The washy dark chocolate from the beer enhanced the caramel filling of the Dairy Milk, but with each sip the beer became thinner in flavour and higher in bitterness, any roasted notes having deserted.

I expected more from the beer; instead of interesting chocolate bolstered by coffee and roasted malts, I got flavours that started heavy-handed and ended up bitter and washy. I found it disconcerting to read the label's assertion that the beer was 'best served chilled'. To me, for a dark beer, that's tantamount to an admission that there's little flavour in there to be savoured in the first place.

Perhaps another beer would make a different impression. I had a bottle of Marble Chocolate knocking around; not strictly speaking a stout but it seemed robust enough for this tasting. And it looked good from the off, a nearly black body with a dappled cream head, clear roast on the nose alongside a clean creamy chocolate flavour. A far better beer than Youngs, so I'd high hopes for the pairing effect.

Well, the chocolate tasted fantastic, that first merging of the beer's roasty notes with this surprisingly tasty caramel. And then... the next mouthful of beer was quite bitter, as if my taste buds had given up on sensing sweetness. More chocolate was fine, more beer was gross - far too bitter, no sense of roasted malt, harsh bittering off-coffee flavours.

Overall, not a very successful pairing. Perhaps the thick milk chocolate swamped the beers, perhaps the beers just didn't have strong enough roast characteristics to cope. If anyone knows how I can get hold of Cocoa Pete's Caramel Knowledge in the UK (or, indeed, any of the Cocoa Pete range) then do let me know as I'd love to try the pairing again with what is obviously a far more robust chocolate. In the meantime, I may have to find a full-blooded stout and a darker caramel bar (??) and try this again sometime soon.