Somerville Chocolate Works with Aeronaut Brewing’s Beer Ingredients

By David Nilsen

Eric Parkes of Somerville Chocolate in Massachusetts has a unique perspective on collaborating with craft breweries: he makes his chocolate inside one.

After working out of his home for a few years after founding his bean to bar chocolate company in 2012, Eric moved into a space available in Aeronaut Brewing’s facility. In addition to a line of single origin bars and some unique inclusion bars—including several unique smoked chocolates—Eric makes a few bars directly inspired by his surroundings in a craft brewery. He says his daily proximity to the brewing process has provided the opportunity for some unexpected creative crossovers.

“The brewers are always running around, so there’s this constant contact,” he explains. “I can walk right over to the equipment and they show me this or that, how it’s going in different steps. I’ve learned a lot about beer making.”

That ongoing creative interaction between chocolate maker and brewer led to two of Eric’s signature bars—Beer Dark Chocolate and Hops Dark Milk.

Hops Dark Milk

Eric has found the sensory experience of being around brewing and beer ingredients particularly stimulating, and one such experience led to the creation of his Hops Dark Milk bar.

“I would occasionally get this beautiful smell of pineapple and citrus from the brewery,” he explains. “At one point I stopped Mark Bowers, one of the brewers, and asked what it was, and told me it was the hops.”

Mark gave him a small bag of the hops and he began thinking about how to incorporate them into chocolate. This led to various experiments for how to add the hops to his chocolate. Some didn’t work so well—such as grinding the hops into a powder and adding them to the chocolate—and he eventually started soaking the hops in the cocoa butter and then straining them out. It’s a laborious process, but it yields the best flavors.

He’s worked with multiple hop varieties, but has found newer, more tropical varieties often found in Hazy IPAs work best, including Citra, Galaxy, and Mosaic. He says he’s had the most luck with Mosaic.

Somerville’s Hops Dark Milk bar offers sweet citrus up front, similar to orange creamsicle, before the subtle bitterness of the hops comes forward with a green tea-like flavor. For any fan of hoppy beer, this is a fascinating display of hop character outside its expected medium.

Beer Dark Chocolate

The process of adding the flavors of beer to one of Somerville’s chocolate bars actually began in the opposite direction. Eric has provided Aeronaut’s brewers with cacao nibs for their chocolate beers for years, most notably Cocoa Sutra, a 7% ABV Milk Stout.

For most chocolate beers, brewers add the nibs during secondary fermentation, the final stage in the brewing process. Aeronaut instead adds Eric’s nibs during primary fermentation, when yeast is actively fermenting the beer. They add the nibs to the fermentation tank in large mesh bags, and when they remove them, they give them back to Eric.

“I get these big, frothy, yeasty bags of nibs and then pulverize them to allow them to infuse even more,” he says. He explains that after drying these beer-soaked nibs out, he proceeds with the chocolate-making process. This unique process leads to truly unique beer flavors in his bar. 

Surprisingly, the Beer Dark Chocolate bar actually showcases more hop character than the Hops Dark Milk in one specific way. The hop bitterness—which here is a sort of tea-like, green bitterness—is higher here than in the bar made directly with hops. Milk stout is not a notably hoppy beer, so why would this be the case? It comes down to brewing chemistry. 

Alpha acids are the bittering agent in hops. In their natural state, alpha acids aren’t bitter enough or water-soluble enough to be much use in brewing, but when they’re boiled, those alpha acids are altered in such a way that they become about four times as perceptibly bitter and about 10 times as water soluble as they are in their natural state. Even though hop flavor and aroma is highlighted in the Hops bar, the nibs for the Beer bar spent time in fermenting beer that had more isomerized hop alpha acids in it, and so the tea-like bitterness is slightly higher, though still beautifully incorporated into the bar. So many beer-infused chocolate bars have only a subtle, complementary influence from the beer that was used. This one tastes unmistakably of the beautiful natural ingredients that give us beer.

“It’s been a bit polarizing,” Eric says of the Beer bar. He’s also tried a second, more conventional method of just soaking the nibs in finished beer and then drying them out to make bars out of them. “The flavors are perhaps a little bit more refined, but don’t get them as quickly.”

Eric recently released a bar made with second use vanilla that had been used in one of Aeronaut’s beers. The creative exchange between these two artisans will hopefully lead to many more unique—and delicious—collaborations.