Beyond TODAY is an extension of our weekly column for the TODAY Show food blog. Here we’ll look at the same subject from another angle, which will likely be far geekier. Click here to see our latest TODAY Show post.
I know it’s a stereotype, but* women really do go crazy for chocolate. It’s innate. Last night before bed, my five year old daughter slumped her shoulders and said “I want chocolate” in a depressed tone. I asked her if there was any in the pantry, figuring she could have a pre-bed snack, and she gave me a totally deflated “no.” Her announcement was completely out of left-field, but she’s certainly not alone. Chocolate is the number one food women crave – even Oprah can back me up on this.
The article I just wrote for the TODAY Show was about how my wife and I sampled a handful of chocolate beers. I figured it’d be a fun thing to do and a good beer topic to cover for Valentine’s Day.
My wife is always happy to sample a beer and tell me her thoughts, but nothing could match her enthusiasm when it came to trying out the chocolate beers I had brought home for her. She was on point with tasting notes, observations about mouthfeel, and she kept an ongoing rank of the beers as she sampled them. She was into it.
Between my daughter’s comments last night and my wife’s eagerness to taste any chocolate beer I put in front of her over the weekend, it struck me that chocolate beers might just be the most female-friendly kind of brews out there. I further hypothesize that this is especially true of the one-note chocolate bombs like Southern Tier Choklat or Terrapin Moo Hoo, which forgo any attempt at geeky complexity and choose instead to simply knock you over the head with chocolate goodness.
If you were trying to introduce a non-foodie woman to the delights of craft beer, a chocolate brew might just be the way to go. Of course you’d have to be careful, because other beers that lack a cocoa kick might very well pale by comparison. I know that during our tasting, the beers my wife liked least were the ones that were the most complex and “beery.” Even though she’s a bit of a beer geek, she wanted pure chocolate delight, not some beer with a hint of chocolate spackling together a malt backbone and a hop finish. Chocolate beers might be an island with no bridge back to the craft beer mainland – a place where a woman’s interest in craft beer is cast away.
Anyway, that’s my theory. What kind of beer do you think is best received by non-beer-geek ladies?
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* I wonder how many times people have been fired for going beyond this point of this sentence?
Filed under: Beer, Lifestyle Tagged: Beer, beers women love, chocolate, craft beer, Food, today show, valentine's day, women beer geeks
