by Paul Blomfield, Paul Blomfield Consulting, Auckland New Zealand

Like human beings, chocolate and beer are both incredibly complex individuals, and pairing their flavour profiles is like the personal ad recently spotted in a cuisine magazine.

From rainforest treasure to luscious goddess, what we call “chocolate” is an equatorial transplant who grows best in tropical rainforests.  She is a gorgeous beauty with red, yellow or brown skin and a sweet nutty interior.  With the proper treatment, she takes on a delectable loveliness that enchants everyone she meets.

Meanwhile, her viticultural suitors are a motley crew.  Some are blokey but like to give you an honest, fresh, clean impression.  Others are pouty and tart, or overweight and intense.  A few are so handsome that their taste and scent are permanently etched on your senses.  Their loving tenderness is an object of adoration.

Matching Chocolate and Beer can be intriguing and satisfying or it can be a disappointing traipse down Disenchantment Street.

Melbourne’s Choc Diva Dr Hanna Frederick of Mámor Chocolates in Collingwood, a food chemist by training, has always been a keen observer of how people pair up.  So it was natural that her artisan chocolate company would continue her interest in matchmaking.

Hanna learned the Dark Art of Chocolate Making in her native Hungary, but as her life took her through Australia, she became familiar with social dances such as line dancing and square dancing that help promote new relationships and romances.

Her idea was to put our Victorian beers up against the equatorial passion of cacao in a new form of South Pacific social dance.

Teaming up with Mountain Goat Brewery in Richmond, Melbourne, Mámor Chocolates designed an experience in requited and unrequited love to please participants at Good Beer Week.

Mámor developed the Chocolate and Beer Pairing Guidelines that match personality elements of beer and chocolate, such as nuttiness or fruitiness, just like a matchmaker would match a love couple.  The team has selected twelve chocolate bride and six Victorian beer groom candidates based on known personality profiles, but then decided to depart from some of the dictums with surprising and enlightening results.

Participants receive a Chocolate Flavour Wheel specially developed by Mámor Chocolates that divides taste and aroma into vegetable, flowery, fruity, roasted, nutty, spicy main categories and many subcategories.  Beer tasters will be familiar with these flavour wheels.

A Tasting Card and golf pencil allows participants to enter their best estimates of flavours and then to draw arrows between the promising matches.  Crisp apple slices between courses clear the palette.  Finally, a Tasting Notes card with all the “answers” is distributed at the end of the party.

The overall lesson of this sexy Line Dance is that chocolate and beer have complex personalities and that the Art of Matchmaking can have surprising and unexpected turns.  The chocolate brides and beer grooms can be paired in ways that show off the best and most interesting aspects of each.  Or they can clash and explode in an instant.  A few simple guidelines are essential, but in the excitement of the dance floor anything can happen. The counsel of a well-versed chocolatier and a knowledgeable beer expert can be helpful but the experimentation of the delicate personalities on the dance floor is what this social is all about.