While I mostly pair craft chocolate with craft beer here at Bean to Barstool, there's a world of great beverages out there for pairing with great chocolate. My good friend Shay Pal seems to have paired bars with most of them through her adventurous tasting and traveling. In this episode, Shay and I discuss how she approaches pairing with craft chocolate, how she avoids getting overwhelmed by the choices in front of her, and how she selects which spirit, wine, coffee, or cocktail to pair with any given bar.

Shay Pal is a chocolate, spirits, and coffee enthusiast from Chicago and runs the @choccoffeewine Instagram account. In this Bean to Barstool Bite Sized conversation, we discuss Crow & Moss Vanilla Smoke, a 69% dark chocolate made with hickory smoked cacao, and Shay makes spirits pairings for this unusual bar.

So many evocative flavors and aromas come from trees without us really thinking about them that way. Cinnamon is a tree bark. Maple syrup comes from tree sap. In the adult beverage world, the quinine that gives bitterness to tonic water and the angostura that flavors the eponymous bitters are both from trees. And of course there are endless variations in smoke aromas, including in beer and chocolate. In this episode we explore the flavor of wood and other tree ingredients in bean to bar chocolate and craft beer.