A Taste Test to Find the Best Chocolate Beers

This beer smells like brownies and tastes like liquid chocolate. It goes down thick, smooth and milky, and, although a rich and viscous mouthful, it’s delicious and, at a mild 5 percent ABV, does not exhaust the palate. This is one of the very best chocolate beers in the category, from a historic brewery that knows its craft.  

This 5.3-percent ABV stout showcases the fruit of the cacao tree with subtlety and restraint. The thick foamy head on the beer dissipates within two minutes, but the ebony brew remains smooth and silky. The taste is bitter, charred and toasty, and the quiet flavor of chocolate is hard to catch unless you’re watching for it.

Made by the nation’s biggest craft brewery, the Sam Adams Chocolate Bock showcases cocoa in a different medium than the conventional stout. The 5-percent ABV beer is a bock, dark tan in hue, with some of the typical “brown” beer flavors, like fig, bread and molasses. The chocolate flavor is subdued but comes forth melded in with the other elements, rich and milky.    

Another low gravity stout, Young’s Double Chocolate Stout carries a powerful aroma of fudge. On the tongue, though, the beer is light and a bit thin—more like water than milk. 

A first sip produces toast, coffee, roasted nuts. Then, after this first rush of flavors surges and passes like a wave, the chocolate advances, bitter but rich. At 6.9 percent ABV and quite the opposite of the sweeter styles, like Samuel Smith’s, Speakeasy’s offering incorporates chocolate more as a complement to the greater effect of the beer, not a highlight on its own. 

You may have tasted ales sour as lemonade, stouts aged in whiskey barrels and porters that taste like smoke, and you think you’ve been to the four corners of the craft beer kingdom—and then you come upon this oddity. It’s an India Pale Ale—the style favored for its bright and zesty hops aromas and mouth-stinging alpha acids. But this one has been steeped in chocolate. The beer is named with a nautical theme—“Castaway”—and a motto line on the bottle reads, “Sink the status quo.” This unusual IPA sinks it. The chocolate gives the beer a curious tootsie roll flavor, and the end result is rather like a barleywine. 

Food tastes lousy without salt, that greatest of flavor enhancers. Though beer does just fine without salt, the brewers at New Belgium Brewing Company decided to give their recently released chocolate stout a boost with an addition of both calcium chloride and sodium chloride. Already a hearty beer at 9 percent ABV, this latest rendition of New Belgium’s Lips of Faith gains from the salt a savory body and textured mouthfeel that it almost seems one could chew on.  

Brewed with cocoa powder and nibs, honey, ancho chili peppers and annatto seeds, Theobroma—the genus of the cacao tree—is Dogfish Head’s tip of the hat to Aztec culture and their ancient use of chocolate as a beverage. The ale is tawny red in color and, if served in the sun, verily glows in the glass. Chocolate nibs aren’t the only unusual ingredient in this beer. Annatto seeds, honey and ancho chilis were also used in the recipe, and the latter two are evident to even the duller of palates, while the chocolate quietly whispers.