Last night we had our very first Sweet Tweet at Boundary Bay Brewery! This year, we’ve gotten into social media pretty deeply and one of our favorite sites is Twitter. We decided to invite some of our Twitter fans to our beer garden for a tasting menu of our new summer desserts. We asked them to help us pair each dessert with a beer and to post tweets about it while attending the event. The tweeters were served the Larabee Cake (a chocolate mouse, meringue and blueberry confection), a Strawberry Shortcake in a honey-champagne glaze and a Cherry Porter Ice Cream cake. They were each poured tasters of a selection of our beers and asked to taste and tweet and tell us what they liked best. They even got to try a chocolate wort reduction sauce drizzled over figs as the grand finale!
Larabee Cake
After tallying the votes, here’s the Sweet Tweet results: the crew chose Dunkles Bock as the clear winner to accompany the Strawberry Shortcake (thought the Stout got a few votes too – especially when tasted with the shortcake biscuit!). “Dunkles Bock brings out some nice complexity and cuts the sweetness.” When it came to pairing beer with the Cherry Porter ice cream cake, the opinions were much more divided. As one of our voters stated quite clearly: “With Dunkles = yum. With Stout = yummier!” One of our tasters thought the Stout was the undeniable obviously right choice, while another observed that the “Dunkles Bock makes the cherries pop…” And last, but not least, the Larabee cake was paired with everything from the lightest (our Lightner Ale) to the Oatmeal Stout. “Stout works with the chocolate perfectly and cleanses the sweetness.” vs. “Ale works surprisingly well…Ale works best with the more strongly flavored desserts, contrary to my expectations.”
Overall, the Sweet Tweet was a great success! We were blessed with a group of Twitter techies who were well versed in beer and food as well. They served as an incredible think-tank and we are so thankful to all of them for being part of this event with us. If you’d like to read more of the comments posted during the Sweet Tweet, go to search.twitter.com and type #bbst (boundary bay sweet tweet) in the search field to see all the results. And, if you’re still longing for more Sweet Tweet action, you can check out all the photos from the event on our Facebook Photos Page.
our sweet tweeters
Bellinghams Best Beer 
Excellent idea: put together a wired customer focus group that immediately broadcasts their results. You get some good feedback on what pairings to recommend and you inspire people who aren’t there to come in and try pairing desserts themselves.
congrats! twitter is a bold leap into a brave new world :-) information at light speed :-)
ggw