Somerville Chocolate & Aeronaut Brewing’s Baltic Porter Experiment

By David Nilsen

We discuss a lot about beer and chocolate collaborations on Bean to Barstool, but few—if any—chocolate makers and brewers have a closer working relationship than Somerville Chocolate and Aeronaut Brewing in Somerville, Massachusetts. Eric Parkes makes his bean to bar chocolate inside the Aeronaut facility, just a short distance from where brewmaster Mark Bowers and Director of Brewing Operations Filipe Garcia are brewing beer. 

This close proximity has allowed for an ongoing creative exchange between brewing and chocolate making, yielding unique beers made with cacao and unique chocolate bars made with beer, brewing ingredients, and cacao and other ingredients that have been first used to make beer. The relationship has allowed for creative experimentation and mutual education.

We’ve previously discussed two of Eric’s bars that have come from this relationship—Hops Dark Milk and Beer Fermented—so let’s take a look at a recent collaboration between Somerville and Aeronaut that highlights the possibilities of this unique partnership.

Aeronaut Brewing recently brewed a Baltic Porter—a strong lager style that has some of the roasted malt flavors of Stouts and other Porters, but without the intensity—and aged it in bourbon and rye whiskey barrels for a year. After that, they split the batch into two casks, and dosed them separately with adjunct ingredients.

In the first cask, they added vanilla and 9 lbs. of lightly roasted (240-260°F for 45 minutes) Ecuadorian cacao. To the second, they added only heavily roasted cacao (300° for about half the time) and no vanilla. The beer on the heavily roasted cacao was conditioned for 24 hours, and the lightly roast with vanilla was allowed to condition for many days to allow the more delicate ingredients to infuse better.

After removing them from the beer, Mark and Filipe gave the cacao and vanilla back to Eric, and he dried them out and made two different 65% dark chocolate bars to correspond to the beers each set of ingredients was used in. These two bars are remarkably different but both delicious. 

In the bar made with vanilla and lightly roasted cacao, the vanilla is really showcased. Rather than a typical baking vanilla, there is a more floral, cherry blossom-like complexity, along with toasted marshmallow. The bar has no harsh edges, with a rich, wooly, soft character.

The more heavily roasted bar is a more classic roasty dark chocolate, with notes of  black tea and a more notable roast quality.

Both are excellent, and show the complexity possible from just subtle changes.

Now I just need to try the corresponding beers from Aeronaut!