Drank: Five Pine Chocolate Porter (Three Creeks Brewing Co.)

Chocolate beers, like chocolate bars, fall along a wide sweetness continuum. Put Rogue’s popular chocolate stout right in the middle. Far to one side, there’s the layered bitterness of Brooklyn Brewery’s Black Chocolate Stout, which is 10 percent alcohol and uses only heavily roasted malted barley, but no cocoa, to get its flavor. On the other side, you’ll find this bottled Hershey’s bar. Brewing with seven specialty malts, Sisters’ Three Creeks Brewing adds Belgian cacao nibs by the pound to create the sweet and smooth Five Pine porter. Interestingly, Three Creeks has a new brewmaster, outspoken traditionalist Zach Beckwith. The Lompoc-trained Beckwith is a vocal proponent of old-fashioned English ales who has criticized “novelty” brews but jumped from the Old Town upstart Pints Brewing only a few months after heating his kettles to take over this hungry-to-expand brewery. So far, Beckwith is still putting chocolate in his beer—I expect some new bitterness, one way or another.