Dark chocolate and stout make a wonderful combination. Whenever I crack open a bottle of Imperial stout, I like to have a square or two of dark chocolate to eat while I drink it. Now that's what I call luxury!

The question is this- can chocolate and stout actually be combined together into a chocolate-flavored stout? We already know that these are two tastes that go very well together, so why not just combine them into a single thing?

Southern Tier Brewing Company makes an Imperial stout with chocolate in it, and they call it Choklat. I tried a bottle of it the other week, but I'm still not sure exactly what I think of it. They didn't go too light on the chocolate, I'll give them that. It has a very strong flavor of rich, dark chocolate.

So why am I not quite convinced? Well, call me old-fashioned, but I'm not really sure about the whole idea of flavored beer in the first place. I had a second bottle of Imperial stout without any chocolate in it on the same night, and I didn't enjoy it any less as a beer just because it didn't have the chocolate. So what does the chocolate really add?

For now, I think, I'll just keep right on doing it the way I've always done it before. A bar of chocolate, a pint glass, and a bottle of stout, each to be applied in its own proper way. A place for everything, and everything in its place.