Red heart, black heart

Valentine’s Day conjures up visions of classic couplings: Romeo and Juliet, John and Yoko, raspberries and chocolate.

Combine those latter two with some beer, and you’ve got a three-way that will warm the cockles of the most demure drinker.

Merchant Du Vin , the Seattle-based importer of fine foreign beers, suggests pairing Lindeman’s Framboise – raspberry-flavored lambic, a tart Belgian beer style fermented with wild, airborne yeast – with Samuel Smith’s Organic Chocolate Stout out of England.

Try putting two or three ounces of Framboise in a pint glass, then topping it off with the stout. “The deep notes of roast malt and chocolate marry beautifully with profound, aromatic raspberry,” the Merchant says.

Find retail locations near you here . Of course, you can experiment with suitable substitutions for the stout, like the chocolate versions from Young’s (another Brit import), Rogue and Southern Tier . Raspberry beers are a bit harder to come by on a regular basis, though Samuel Smith’s makes an organic one.

Or you could let Hopped Up do the work for you. The Spokane Valley brewery is pouring a Chocolate Raspberry Porter (6 percent alcohol by volume, 34 International Bitterness Units), infused after fermentation with homegrown berries from last summer’s harvest along with Ghirardelli chocolate.

“We were just trying to come up with something different for Valentine’s Day,” says owner/brewer Steve Ewan, who did an orange vanilla version of the porter last year. “It’s got a lot of good berry flavor.”

And by the way, it’s a variation on Hopped Up’s standard porter, called High Performance – which is a fitting sentiment for Valentine’s Day, too.