Bean to Barstool Podcast | Somerville Chocolate & Aeronaut Brewing

April 17, 2024 | David Nilsen

In this episode of Bean to Barstool, we’re looking at a fascinating collaboration between a craft chocolate maker and a craft brewery. Eric Parkes at Somerville Chocolate is a tenant in Aeronaut Brewing’s building in Somerville, Massachusetts, so he makes chocolate just a short distance from where brewmaster Mark Bowers and Director of Brewing Operations Filipe Garcia are brewing beer. This has allowed for an ongoing creative exchange between these worlds, 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. In this interview, Eric, Mark, Filipe, and host David Nilsen discuss the benefits of this arrangement and look in detail at the beers and chocolate bars that have come from it.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | Arron Liu of Chocobien

May 17, 2023 | David Nilsen

In this episode of Bean to Barstool, David Nilsen talks with Arron Liu of Chocobien in Hong Kong. Chocobien is a bean-to-bar chocolate company that produces many truly unique bars that employ flavors and ingredients from other artisan food and beverage segments, including beer, whiskey, coffee, sake, tea and more. Chocobien’s Beer Fermented bar uses malt, hops, and beer yeast in innovative ways to subtly evoke the flavors of beer from Hong Kong’s Black Kite Brewing. Arron talks about the ideas behind these bars, the partnerships and processes that went into their development, and the satisfaction this curious and creative maker finds in achieving the flavors he could only hold in his imagination at the start of each experiment.

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Bean to Barstool Podcast | Nostalgia Chocolate’s Love Affair with Hops

August 10, 2022 | David Nilsen

In this episode of Bean to Barstool, we talk with Tyler Cagwin of Nostalgia Chocolate in Syracuse, New York, about his perspective on tasting chocolate, his experience working with brewers and hop growers, and his process for crafting his unique Hops Aged chocolate bar made with New York-grown Chinook hops. We also talk to Chad Meigs at The Bineyard hop farm, who supplied the hops for this bar, and Jordan Pollock and Ivan Dedek at Meier’s Creek Brewing, who recently used Tyler’s cacao from Nostalgia Chocolate in a new Porter.

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