MIller – Memphis Flyer

Memphians love a good lemon pepper chicken wing. But have they tried lemon-pepper-chicken-wing-flavored … chocolate?

If there’s anyone who can pull it off, it’s Phillip Ashley Rix, owner of Phillip Ashley Chocolates. And a recent partnership with Miller High Life means that Rix will be bringing an intriguing selection of six bar-snack-inspired truffles to Memphis next month.

“Miller reached out to me, and their objective was to create an ode to bar food and bar culture,” says Rix. “The group asked, ‘How do we capture the flavor and sensory experience of being in a dive bar and washing some snacks down with a Miller High Life?’ So I started telling them about how I used to enjoy a grilled cheese and wash it down with a Miller High Life, and the ideas just started flowing from there.”

Starting May 2nd, Phillip Ashley Chocolates will produce 1,000 limited-run boxes of Miller High Life Bar Snack Truffles. No stranger to incorporating fascinating flavors into his creations, Rix will include six different truffle varieties in each box.

“This is our wheelhouse,” he says. “I’ve always sought to do avant-garde-centric flavor profiles. Not for the sake of being sensational, but to create something sensational, to create something that has a great flavor profile, tastes good, and is also something that piques the imagination of the consumer.”

Phillip Ashley Rix (Credit: Justin Fox Burks / ICF Next)

Rix hopes that the creative flavors will make buyers curious about his new styles. The aforementioned grilled cheese and lemon pepper flavors are two of his favorites, but the others cover a broad range of bar snacks. There’s the “beernut,” which is Rix’s take on a peanut butter cup, while he calls the pretzel praline truffle a perfect mix of “sweet and salty.” The buttery popcorn truffle is infused with the flavors of movie-theater-style popcorn, while the sweet potato fry blends a sweet potato mash with blond chocolate.

“The ingredients really live in the chocolate,” says Rix. “With the lemon pepper, we have a cool way of making cracklin out of chicken skin. Then I have a background in chemistry, so we turn it into a format where we can infuse it into the ganache. So you’ll get all the chicken flavor without all the unpleasant texture.

“And we infuse the ‘champagne of beer’ in the truffles as well. It’s a collaborative effort because my goal is to design and deliver a product that Miller will be pleased with, but also to create something that encapsulates my experience with Miller as a consumer of theirs. And the memories I have of enjoying snacks in dive bar with a Miller, maybe munching on some popcorn or sweet potato fries, I synthesize those with my expertise in science and food, and the result is a really fun exercise in two brands coming together.”

Even after the Miller box goes on sale, Rix will continue to push the envelope when it comes to chocolate, as his passion for the craft keeps him eager to unlock new taste combinations. “I’ve always made it a point to be an encyclopedia of flavor, always staying up on trends and then just having ideas in the locker, so that when someone like Miller calls, I have something to work through. I hadn’t done grilled cheese before, but I had incorporated cheeses into my chocolates. And I hadn’t done chicken wings, but I did pioneer a fried chicken chocolate. So they are natural evolutions of the ideas I’ve had before.”

Boxes will be available to order on the Phillip Ashley Chocolates website for $35 starting May 2nd.

I cannot write about Donald Trump again this week. I just can’t. It’s beyond madness, beyond commentary, at this point. We are careening toward a come-to-Jesus moment in this country like none in our history, and it won’t be pretty.

So I’ll write about beer.

That’s right, beer. Our cover story is about beer, and I have a long history with beer, and I think that recounting it will prove instructive for all these craft-beery young ‘uns who take for granted their fancy Kölsches and porters and Icelandic ales and such.

It wasn’t always like this, kids. (And get off my lawn!) There didn’t used to be craft breweries on every corner, giving you beer options that rival Baskin-Robbins. Bars didn’t used to have 47 beers on tap. Waiters didn’t offer you a beer menu.

When I was a young man in Missouri, we drank Budweiser, the damn King of Beers, made from the finest rice ever grown. It was all we knew, really. Oh sure, we also drank Miller, “The Champagne of Bottled Beers,” but beer options were few, and they all tasted alike, anyway. Except for Stag. Stag really sucked.

While in college, we would sometimes drive to Kansas City and come back with cases of an exotic brew from the West called Coors, which was unavailable east of the Missouri border. We thought Coors was sophisticated and sexy, until we realized it had an alcohol content of 3.2, which meant you got bloated before you could get drunk — a real problem for college students.

Then in the 1980s, I took a job in Pittsburgh, and my beer world opened up. They made beer in Pennsylvania, lots of it: Straub, Rolling Rock, Stoney’s, Yuengling, and Iron City, which makes terrible beer. In fact, IC Light may be the single worst beer ever made. (Except for Stag. Stag really sucked.) Iron City’s claim to fame was their excellent commemorative cans with images of the Steelers, Pirates, and Penguins, which probably kept them in business.

While in Pittsburgh, I also discovered many excellent Canadian beers — Molson, Labatt, Moosehead — which are best consumed while camping with manly friends in the wilderness and saying “Good beer, eh?” to each other after each sip.

Then, in 1994, I moved to Memphis, which was then the worst beer city in America. Actually, Tennessee was the worst beer state in America; Memphis was no different from Nashville or Knoxville. The American beer lobby (Big Beer) had gotten the legislature to gerrymander state regulations to outlaw the selling or serving of beer that came in containers measured in liters rather than gallons, thereby eliminating foreign beers. The only beers you could buy in Memphis at that time were made by the American corporate big boys. I was back in the land of Bud and Miller. Sad! Very unfair!

Shortly after I moved here, I was invited to a party where we were asked to bring “interesting beers.” To do so, I discovered, you had to go to the Walgreen’s in West Memphis, where the proprietors — seeing an obvious market — had in stock an immense and diverse selection of brews from around the world. It was not an ideal situation. And it wasn’t legal to bring beer back over the bridge, but we risked it. Those were hard times, kids.

A few years later, thanks to the tireless efforts of then-state Senator Steve Cohen, Tennessee’s odious “keg law” was finally overturned, and Guinness and Beck’s and Kirin Ichiban and many other brews from around the world began flowing from the beer taps of Memphis. It was like the Berlin Wall had fallen. Now, it all seems like a bad dream, a lifetime ago. Memphis breweries are crafting creative and dynamic brews of all kinds — lagers, ales, ciders, pilsners, porters, you name it. We’re now living in brewtopia, bro. Still, I think it’s only fitting that acknowledgement be given to those who came before — the pioneers of beer. So the next time you’re enjoying that frosty RockBone on the deck of your favorite pub, I simply ask that you lift a glass in their honor.

Or just buy me a cold one.