Confusion→Knowledge→Confusion: Growing as a Taster & Student of Beer & Chocolate
By David Nilsen
In Episode 55 of Bean to Barstool, Sarah Bharath of Meridian Cacao said, “No cacao-producing country has a single flavor profile. Not one.” It’s such a simple truth, but still one that requires us to take a step back from how we often summarize cacao and chocolate flavor. (I’ve noticed a similar dynamic in beer, which we’ll get to in a moment.)
When we’re trying to learn more about cacao and bean to bar chocolate, it can be helpful to have easy summaries to help us organize information and make sense of the dazzling variety in front of us. It’s like there are several bins with labels on them like “red berries”, “earthy”, “chocolatey”, and other descriptions, and you’re picking up bars made with beans from different places and tossing them into one bin or another to try to figure everything out.
In beer, a similar dynamic exists with learning beer styles. There are well over a hundred recognized beer styles from dozens of countries, and plenty of hybrids in between. When you’re working to better understand beer, formal beer style guidelines are a life raft, because there’s just too much information and variety to sort through otherwise. The best-known guidelines are published by the Beer Judge Certification Program, and these are the guidelines the Cicerone Certification Program uses for the style portions of its exams.
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These organizational systems—whether with origin and flavor profile for chocolate or styles for beer—can be helpful for a time. When you’re first getting started, having easy categories can help you quiet the cacophony of flavors, terminology, histories, and overwhelming variety. Hopefully, as we start to figure out the lay of the land, we can make that organizational system a little more nuanced. Eventually, we realize a geographical flavor organization system like this can actually limiting our understanding of chocolate flavor, and that beer styles are a fairly modern concept and the past and present of beer varieties is actually quite fluid and varied, that any beer is always just one specific interpretation of a style, and that brewers can always just ignore the guidelines and do something new anyway.
Learning what’s what in both craft chocolate and beer is like a circle where you start at confusion, work toward greater systematic understanding, and then, when you’re more seasoned and knowledgeable, you’re basically back at confusion. Throwing up your hands in surrender could almost be seen as finally getting it.
It’s easy at any point along this journey to be defensive or annoyed with folks at other places on that timeline. It’s important to understand how you learn best and allow yourself to do that, and allow others to do the same. As you’re learning, hold that information somewhat loosely, allowing it to change as your understanding deepens.
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Looking back at my own journey with beer, I would have been lost without an organizational system like the BJCP, and I think that’s probably true for a lot of students of beer. There’s simply too much variety in the beer world to make sense of it all without being able to categorize styles and make definitive statements about different styles in order to get a lay of the land. Eventually, once you understand the literature of beer better, you realize there are countless blurred lines and exceptions and very few absolutes. That doesn’t invalidate the value of working in absolutes early on, while you’re learning, as long as you understand what you’re using them for, and what you aren’t.
I like to think of learning with these cacao origin profiles or beer style guidelines as laying down reference lines with pencil when you’re drawing a picture. They’re necessary early on, but you’re going to end up erasing them as the picture takes on more detail. Eventually, you’ll have a more complete image, and the straight reference lines will be gone altogether. It will all be shading, soft lines, implication.
No country’s cacao has a single flavor profile. That is 100% true. At the same time, don’t feel bad for using just one or two descriptors for origins when you’re starting out. If you’re learning about beer, don’t feel bad for using style guidelines as a firm scaffolding to help you ascend in your beer knowledge. It helps for a time, as long as you work to diversify your understanding of flavor and style, and be gracious and curious at every step along the way.