Join me for a look back at my favorite beers and chocolates of 2021, with some pairings along the way. After you’ve listened to the show, I’d love to hear your own favorites from this bizarre trip around the sun.

Videri Chocolate in Raleigh, North Carolina, is celebrating its 10th anniversary on December 15, and makes a full line of single origin and inclusion bars, as well as bonbons and other confections, and they also provide cacao in various forms for numerous breweries in the craft beer hotbed of North Carolina. In this interview, we hear from founder Sam Ratto and two brewers who work with his cacao.

Bean to bar chocolate maker Sara Ratza of Ratza Chocolate loves craft beer almost as much as chocolate, and she recently provided Bolivian cacao to Brighter Days Brewing for Hooray for Hazel, a bourbon barrel-aged Imperial Stout that also included lactose and hazelnuts. Check out my quick interview with Sara here!

Tyler Cagwin at Nostalgia Chocolate makes bean to bar chocolate for a living, but he loves craft beer too. He recently partnered with The Bineyard hop farm to make a chocolate bar with Chinook hops. He always worked with Meier’s Creek Brewing to provide cacao for a Chocolate Porter. Hear from Tyler in this new episode.

Fantasy and mythology drive much of what husband and wife team Tobias Cichon and Raiye Rosado do at Rabid Brewing. As the brewery celebrates their 4th anniversary, I sat down with the pair to talk about the passion behind their brewery, the mythological backstories behind their beers, and the sense of adventure the keeps them pursuing their dream.

In this quick interview with beer educator and Advanced Cicerone Natalya Watson, I talked with Nat about how we develop a better tasting vocabulary and ability to describe beer, and she highlighted the importance of practice and curiosity.

In this episode we’ll talk with Megan Giller, a chocolate writer and educator. Megan will tell the story of women in 17th and 18th century Mexico and other Central American countries who were accused of using chocolate in their witchcraft. Grab yourself some tasty bean to bar chocolate and follow along for this spellbinding tale.

Need the perfect theme for your at-home beer tasting party with friends? There are dozens and dozens of beer styles out there, so let a beer expert make some suggestions for how to weed through the confusion and pick the perfect theme for your beer tasting.

Connections have been drawn between Medieval female brewers and our modern day image of witches, from pointy hats to cauldrons, and black cats to broom sticks. The story gets passed around that modern iconography of witches comes from these Medieval alewives. But is there any truth to these stories? Beer historian Dr. Christina Wade has the answers.

Weldwerks Brewing in Greeley, Colorado, recently partnered with Denver bean to bar chocolate maker Cultura Chocolate on a variant of their legendary Medianoche Imperial Stout that’s all about the chocolate. Listen to learn all about this fantastic and delicious chocolate beer.

Our senses are made of magic (driven by really cool science), and engaging our senses by tasting chocolate can transport us to other places and times, summon memories, evoke emotions, and provoke imagination.

Today’s guest is a chocolate educator who uses chocolate as a way to travel the world, recalling places she’s been and imagining ones she hasn’t, and helping others to do the same. All that’s required is an open and curious mind and a piece of chocolate. Join us for a conversation with Sanna Forslund about traveling through our senses, tasting chocolate with a sense of wonder, and how the natural world and the people around us can help us grow in our ability to do both.

When you’re pairing beer and chocolate, you aren’t pairing a meal; you’re pairing a moment. So how do you make that moment the best it can be? There are some special considerations when it comes to pairing craft beer and bean to bar chocolate, and in this episode beer writer David Nilsen walks some of through those, offering tips on how to pair chocolate and beer. He also shares some of his favorite beer and chocolate pairings from the past year.

Tasting craft beer or bean to bar chocolate can be a beautiful and profound experience. We engage all of our senses when we taste craft beer and bean to bar chocolate, an experience that engages our memories, emotions, and imaginations as well. In this episode we discuss the process of tasting craft beer and craft chocolate and explore how this connects us to ourselves, the world around us, and the people we meet.

What could be better for Father Day’s than bean to bar chocolate bonbon bars made with amazing craft beer? French Broad Chocolates in Asheville, North Carolina, have once again partnered with Burial Beer on a series of four “bean to bonbon” bars, and they’re as complex, elegant, and indulgent as the beers they’re made with.

In today’s episode we talk about and taste through French Broad’s bonbon bars made with beers from Burial Beer.

There are countless similarities between the worlds of craft beer and bean to bar chocolate, and few people know that as well as Scott Watson. Scott was a professional craft brewer in the 1990s when craft beer was just beginning to gain national attention. After leaving the craft beer world, he eventually discovered bean to bar chocolate and founded Loon Chocolate.

In today’s episode Scott shares his memories of brewing craft beer, what makes him love chocolate making, and numerous ways in which these two artisan industries remind him of each other.

Honey bees are so cool. There were several beverages in antiquity that were fermented from honey, many of which have survived today. Mead is fermented entirely from honey, while braggot is basically a hybrid of beer and mead. In recent history, Belgian brewers have proven adept at brewing biere de miel, less a style than a group of beers that incorporate honey. And from there, modern craft brewers have started putting honey into more and more styles.

In today’s episode we talk with professionals who work in honey, beer, and chocolate about the use of honey in our favorite indulgences.

Maple is intimately tied to life in eastern North America, and in today’s episode, you’ll hear from Canadian and American bean to bar chocolate makers and American craft brewers who use maple sap, sugar, and syrup local to their areas in thoughtful, nuanced chocolates and beers. All of them had memories that tied the flavor of maple into the stories of their lives, and in this episode you’ll hear how evocative the smells and flavors of maple can be.

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.

In this episode, we talk with Xoco by Corina, a bean to bar maker who is partnering with Lervig Beer, a prominent Norwegian craft brewery, to create 3 Bean Stout Chocolate, a 70% dark chocolate bar that is perhaps more evocative of the Amazon than the Arctic, but nonetheless demonstrates the tapestry of influences that make beer and chocolate so exciting.

Maverick Chocolate in Cincinnati recently collaborated with Sam Adams on Black Forest Gateau, a strong and elegant Imperial Stout brewed with cherry and cacao and aged in bourbon barrels. In this episode we talk with a Maverick founder and a Sam Adams brewer about this indulgent beer.