For three years running, I have made a springtime sojourn to Philadelphia to host a beer dinner at the greatest of that city's many great beer destination, Monk's Café. And every year, Tom Peters and his chef Adam Glickman and I have gotten weirder and weirder.
The theme of this year's dinner was truly odd and, I must admit, was solely my idea. Why not have every course include both cheese and chocolate, I challenged Adam and Tom. To my surprise, and perhaps theirs too, they accepted.
The meal, which was far too complicated to explain in only a few paragraphs here, was delicious. But it was the welcoming drink that came to mind as I pondered this month's TOTM, and having accepted the blame for the oddball theme of the dinner, here I must also boast responsibility for said cocktail's creation.
Seeking to emulate at least a portion of the dinner's ingredients, I decided that I would like to start people off with a beer to put them in mind of chocolate. Yet serving a straight chocolate ale such as the Rogue Chocolate Stout struck me as too easy, so I decided instead that we should create a chocolate-covered cherry of a drink, specifically a Champagne flute of Hanssens Kriek accented by a small amount of the aforementioned Chocolate Stout. I named the drink the 'Spontaneous Sebbie' for the wild yeast fermentation of the Hanssens lambic and the picture of Rogue rep Sebbie Buhler which graces the label of the Chocolate Stout.
To my delight, the flavour of the drink was sublime, with just enough chocolate and roast emanating from the stout to round out the deliciously tart and normally more austere Kriek. I was particularly pleased since, when I proposed the beer cocktail, I had no was of testing it for myself. The first time I tasted it, with equal parts pleasure and relief, was just moments before it was served to all the dinner attendees.
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