Whoopie Pie and Two Roads NITRO Espressway Cold Brew Coffee Stout
Two Roads brewery has become a standard bearer for the Connecticut brewing scene. They have an awesome brewery and lots of quality beers, every year they seem to get better and better.
The Beer: Nitro stouts are perfect cookie beers. This one gives the mouth feel, aroma, and sensation that when first sipped you are actually drawing on a brewed cup of iced coffee, rather than a stout brewed with hops. I also have found that cold brewed coffee can have a far super profile of flavors over a traditional brew. The grounds sit in the coffee for a day or so before being strained so much more coffee goodness ends up in your cup. I feel like this makes a difference in the Two Roads coffee stout. This type of stout has become pretty popular around the CT beer trail but this one has a little extra that makes it rise above the rest. You can get bottles of this in most package stores but not in nitro.
The Cookie: There aren’t that many cookie names that might make a person blush, but this may be one. Although, is a whoopie pie a cookie? I feel like we need to hash out the philosophical conflict around our operational definition of cookie in our little adventure here in a separate post some day. While the whoopie pie may not be a cookie in the traditional sense, I think we can make an exception for something so delicious. In my personal attempt to live a healthy and nutritious lifestyle I have been walking past these red velvet whoopie pies for weeks resisting the urge to purchase them. Knowing I was going to Two Roads in the search of the perfect pairing, I finally pulled the trigger and it was totally worth it. The red velvet cake while very mild in its red velvet-ness was very tasty, and it had a little crispness to the edges and a soft, pillowy center. The frosting was super sweet vanilla cream, almost to the Twinkie filling status but not quite.
On a side note I think someone needs to make a milk chocolate whoopie pie with some decorative icing to make it look like Chewbacca and call them Wookie Pies, who’s in?
The Pairing: The cookie elevates this beer and the beer softens the cookie to make this a really great match. The sweetness of the frosting and cake calm both the bitter hop finish, as well as the bitter coffee bites of the stout. The coffee compliments the cake in a “having dessert on a Sunday afternoon at grandmas house” kind of way. There is a reason people have been drinking coffee while eating dessert for years. This pairing steals from that tradition and I’m not complaining about that one bit.
