For eight nights during Good Beer Week 2012, we poured only Victorian craft beers and paired them with fine Mamor chocolates. See the menu here. Each guest was served six tasting glasses of selected Victorian beers to match twelve different chocolates truffles (and palette-cleansing Hungarian potato scones). Many people used the special Tasting Card to record their impressions. Everyone left with a Six-Pack of Mámor’s Mountain Goat Hightail Beer Chocolates.

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.

Mámor has finally uncovered the secret of how to coax malt to compete . . . and win . . . against dark chocolate.

The result is pure harmony! It’s Mámor’s Mountain Goat Hightail™ Beer Truffle.

“We have tried beers from all over the world, but we found the perfect one here in our own backyard in Melbourne,” says Melbourne’s Choc Diva Dr Hanna Frederick. The new dark chocolate truffle is being rolled out for Good Beer Week 12-29 May in Melbourne

Mountain Goat Hightail™ is an English-inspired Amber Ale, light copper to light brown in colour, with a balance of caramel and malty flavours.

Hanna, a trained food chemist, found a trick that allows the floral components of the 71% Dark Belgian Callebaut chocolate to come through to match the strong hoppy and malty notes.

The Hightail Chocolate Truffle has its own nose too.  You can smell a mixture of toffee and fruit aromas with a lovely aromatic lift.  Burnt phenolic even nicotine characters with fresh slightly sweet flavours.

The Melbourne Musicians present brilliant young American violinist Andrew Sords
in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K.219. The program includes Mozart’s delightful Symphony No.29 in A major, K.201 and Haydn’s Symphony No. 26 in D minor “Lamentation”, one of the first Sturm und Drang symphonies, written for Easter.
Book at Ticketek www.ticketek.com or 1300 795 012.

Andrew Sords was born in Newark, Delaware in 1985. Celebrated for his mature musicality and consummate technique, he has appeared with over 80 orchestras and in countless venues across three continents. The 2011-2012 season will showcase the concerti of Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Mozart and Prokofiev and features international debuts in Mexico, Poland and Australia. Sords is the featured violinist in a documentary on violin technique recorded at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Strongly committed to the promotion of classical music, he dedicates a portion of his time at nearly all engagements to educational outreach, master classes and community programming.

Andrew Sords will give extensive master classes at Monash University on Monday April 30. He is available for interviews on Friday, the 27th of April.

For further info please contact:

Frank Pam
Artistic Director
Melbourne Musicians
Phone (61+ 3) 98174221
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
www.melbournemusicians.com

Dahlings, Did you know that in Central Europe, where I am from, we celebrated the Christian tradition with a Pagan twist?

In my childhood in Hungary, we held a fertility rite with Easter eggs and with boys sprinkling water or perfume on the heads of girls. But looking like Twiggy at age 16, no boys every sprayed me. So my brother had to pour lots of perfume on my hair so I would smell convincing enough the next day at school!

Our tradition was to paint red hardboiled eggs with folk designs on them. Have a look at this beautiful red and gold handpainted eggs, made by Hungarian artist Marika Ujvary.

You can buy these fragile jewels for $12 each at our Collingwood shop. We also have handmade Easter egg and bunny chocolates in baskets, buckets or cello bags.

Here you can see our Army of Bunnies, but one of them is kissing another. Don’t Tell, as the Americans say. You will also find our painted eggs and chocolate eggs filled with just what you choose.

• Wednesday 28 March – 8pm‘Mozart Hits’
• Mozart – Concerto for Flute and Harp in C, K.299;
  Mozart – Arias and Duets;
  Schuster – Sinfonia Concertata in C;
  Haydn – Notturno No.6 in G (H.II: 36)
• Karin Leitner, flute; Jacinta Dennett, harp; Elena Xanthoudakis, soprano; Alexandra Sherman, mezzo-soprano
• Sunday 29 April – 5pm‘Mozart and Beethoven’
• Mozart – Violin Concerto No. 5 in A, K.219;
  Beethoven – Ah Perfido! Op.65;
  Haydn – Symphony No.26 in D minor;
  Bartok – Rumanian Folk Dances
• Andrew Sords, violin; Alexandra Sherman, mezzo-soprano

The event will take place at MELBA HALL University of Melbourne, Royal Parade, Parkville (map). Book now on 9685 5111 or tickets for sale online