Chocolate and chilli: the missing link

"WOULD YOU like to spend an evening drinking beer and eating chocolate?" It's one of those questions that has you searching every word for small print along the lines of 'the value of your investment can go down as well as up,' or 'actual product may vary from illustration.'

However, the invitation was genuine. Beautiful Beer, the industry-backed campaign aimed at raising consumer awareness of the variety and appeal of beer styles, was hosting a beer and chocolate tasting, and Pub Food was invited.

Nor was this a matter of four tins of Kestrel and a Curly-Wurly. The venue was Rococo Chocolates in Marylebone High Street in London, an upmarket address for an upmarket operation.

This is a proper chocolate shop, not a street corner confectioners that knocks out a few slabs of Fruit 'n' Nut. Until now, I thought the girl in the Flake ad was about as sophisticated as chocolate gets, but the glamorous and knowledgeable staff at Rococo make her seem like, quite frankly, Peggy Mitchell on a bad night at the Queen Vic.

The aim of the evening was to highlight beer's affinity with chocolate. There is, believe it or not, some genuine science behind this proposition that the two are soulmates.

Dr David Long, director of brewing at the British Beer & Pub Association, talked us through it: "Essentially, beer and chocolate share the same basic taste, which is a balance of bitterness - derived from the cocoa beans in chocolate, the hops in beer - and sweetness - from the chocolate's sugar and beer's malted barley.

"They also deliver a similar mouthfeel. The chocolate melts in the mouth, while the alcohol in beer creates a warming mouthfeel. So when they're consumed together, the tastes and textures complement each other."

The format called on us to sample Rococo's chocolates with beers chosen to create different taste combinations. Among my fellow tasters were two stalwart founding members of The Publican's beer & food matching panel, beer writer Ben Macfarland and Kamini Dickie of brewing research specialists BRI, and another old friend of Pub Food, author and broadcaster Pete 'Three Sheets to the Wind' Brown.

The matches

As ever, these are personal reflections on the suitability of the matches, not the individual products

• Rococo house truffle paired with Fuller's 1845 and Liefman's Kriek. This was a gentle compare-and-contrast introduction to the process, with the high-in-cocoa truffle matched with a rich bitter and a fruit beer. For my money, there aren't many experiences in life that can't be enhanced by a glass of 1845, but the combination of the Lambic cherry beer and the bitterness of the chocolate was also a taste revelation - I'm not normally a fan of fruit beers, but this worked.
• Crystallised ginger artisan bar paired with Blandford Fly and Kronenbourg Blanc. The match with Badger Brewery's ginger-flavoured brew looked perfect on paper, but I felt the subtleties of Blandford Fly were overwhelmed by the intense ginger hit of the chocolate. Other panel members loved this pairing, though. The S&N wheat beer also had to work a bit too hard to keep up with the ginger's flavour.
• Mocha coffee organic artisan bar paired with Young's Double Chocolate Stout. It's not hard to see why only one beer was put up against this intense coffee-flavoured bar. This was far and away the best match of the night, with the bitter chocolate notes of the stout complemented by the coffee flavour.
• Chilli truffle paired with Deuchar's IPA and Peroni - that's right, chilli! Apparently the South Americans, who have known about cocoa beans and chilli peppers much longer than the rest of us, love this sort of thing. All I can say is, the cool, light finish of both beers was most welcome after a mouthful of the chilli truffle. But a word of advice to single blokes out there - these are not the chocs to present her with on a first date.
• The winners

Analysis of the overall panel rankings show the house truffle with Liefman's Kriek and the mocha bar with Young's Double Chocolate Stout as the joint winners. The house truffle with 1845 and Deuchars with chilli truffle were runners-up.