Level: Apprentice
Read time: 11 minutes
Today we have two questions related to Brewing Cocoa and I find one of them really interesting from an assumption standpoint.
Question 1
When I make coffee in a French Press, I pour it out into a cup or carafe as soon as it’s done, so it doesn’t get bitter from steeping too long. Does this matter for cacao? I find for tea/herbal tea it varies. If I can leave cacao on the grounds while I drink it, that would just make the process more efficient, with fewer dishes to wash.
Response 1
Like so many things this is a matter of personal taste. I happen to like it poured off the grounds pretty quickly. In many ways it is the same for all my brewed beverages. I like using good, strong loose leaf tea steeped only 3-4 minutes. My French press coffee I tend to like steeped only 2-3 minutes. You might notice I call for quite a bit of brewing cocoa per cup. This dovetails with how I brew my tea and coffee also. Good quality, use a lot, steep quickly. Some people want to use less and brew longer but I find that gives a thinner and more bitter cup. I much prefer to use more for a shorter length of time.
And the same goes for grinding. I’ve found time and again more is not better, and by more, in this case I mean finer is not always better. I talk about this in our Brewing cocoa video. Sure, a finer grind can give you more flavor, but that is not to say it is more good flavor. Often it is more bitterness and/or astringency.
Question 2
Your brewing cocoa has different sizes in it and I grinded (sic) it so it looks more like my coffee. A very even and fine grind is super important you know. It also lets me use less than you call for. I’m having trouble with it getting bitter when I let it sit on the grounds as I sip it. I think you should sell whole beans so people can grind it fresh and it doesn’t get bitter. I love your product but I wish it didn’t require extra work. Would you fix it so I don’t have to ground(sic) it again? It kind of defeats the purpose of having your brewing cocoa cheaper than others if I have to grind it myself and use more of it.
Ramble 2
I need to rephrase what I’m hearing here.
Hi, I think I know better than you about your product and know your motivations for selling it. But what I’m drinking has issues. Would you fix the issues I caused by changing how I use your product? I would love it even more if you would give me what I want.
Ok, maybe it isn’t quite that bad, but it isn’t far off either. These puzzle me. This is up there with RTFM https://xkcd.com/293/ You buy a product and try to use it as you want it to work and disregard the knowledge of the person or company that designed it and spelled out how to use it.
I want to back up on this and say I’ve no issue at all if you want to disregard my recommendations on how to use pretty much anything I sell….but by doing so you also give up your implied right to ask me to troubleshoot your results.
To me, you have these choices when using any product:
Use the product as directed.
If you don’t like it, you can:
ask for input as maybe you aren’t using it quite right
not use the product
change how you are using it and STFU
What you should not do is:
Inspect the product
Decide you know better
Change how you use the product
Complain you don’t like the product.
With that little bit of venting out of my system, I want to take this opportunity to dive into why I produce brewing cocoa the way I do.
First and foremost, I like the results. If you like them as I do, wonderful, we can have an awesome buyer/seller relationship as I’m offering something you like. If you don’t like it, no harm, no foul, I’m not offended, tastes differ and none are right or wrong.
I think by talking about my motivations and product development, most if not all of these items can be addressed.
I have tried other brewing cocoas out there that shall remain unnamed. To mix metaphors, they are not my cup of tea. I’m not saying they aren’t good products, just that I don’t personally like them. At some point I had customers asking which beans I would recommend for making their own brewing cocoa and I quickly discovered when I tested them, again they were not to my tastes. At that point I had a problem to solve so I started working out what I didn’t like about them and started addressing them one by one.
My goal was never to compete for market share. It also was not to under cut the competition price wise nor tell you to use more than you need so I get more sales. It was to produce something I liked and offer that to my customers.
I found first off that cocoa does not really act or taste like coffee and even though some companies market it as a coffee alternative and when treated as such, I didn’t like the results.
With conversations with of the owners of said unnamed companies I found out that their product appearance and proportion recommendations were based almost exclusively on perception and not taste. Like many sugar substitutes, making life easy for the customer by producing something that looks like coffee and can be used in the same proportion as coffee was their approach. Whether it produced a good tasting product was beside the point. That isn’t how I do business so I instead deconstructed the process and tweaked it until I liked the results.
What that meant was that I roasted it different. I produce a number of blends that range from light to dark but at no point do I use coffee terminology. There is never a City roast brewing cocoa nor a French roast. Those are coffee terms and marketing BS to my mind. I trust you are an intelligent person and can work out when I say something is dark, well, it is dark. I don’t need to compare it to coffee for you.
Because they are related, I also had to experiment with grind and roast level at the same time. Through plenty of combinations I slowly zeroed in on what might be described as a mixed modality grind. That is a fancy way of saying there is a pretty large variation in particle size. There is some fine dust, and some larger pieces. What I found was when I tried to visually clean up the grind and make it very uniform, the cup simply didn’t taste as good. A very fine grind always had an astringent edge I didn’t like and a very consistent medium grind with no fines lacked body.
There is also this interesting comment:
“A very even and fine grind is super important you know”
As a matter of fact, I don’t know this or more to the point, I disagree with this. One of my open secrets is that I’m a huge coffee nerd/geek. Many years ago I was part of a group that went down a rabbit hole of grind consistency vs cup quality. It was a generally recognized truth that the grind produced by a whirly blade grinder was not great. There was too much dust and too many boulders and the more consistent grind of a good burr grinder produced a better cup. That logic followed that if more consistent was good, perfect consistency must be great. Sieves were brought out, grind was tweaked and narrowed and pushed and it was all a bunch of sciency geeky fun that was in no way practical but we had the exuberance and naiveté of youth and damn it, we were sure we were on the path to the next big breakthrough of the best cup of coffee ever. But reality had other ideas. The more consistent we made the grind the more boring the cup got. Depth of flavor and mouthfeel went away. Through tons of iterations and way too much caffeine we pretty much came to the conclusion that you needed different grinds in there for the most dynamic cup. Boulders and dust were inferior, but a grind that consisted of all the particles being between 129 and 132 microns was also inferior to one that had 60% of the particles between 180-200 and 40% 100-140 (BTW, those numbers I just made up on the spot as a way to make a point). So what we ended up ‘discovering’ was bimodal grinding (close to what I call mixed modality grinding above). It is basically a fancy way of saying controlled inconsistency and that a “very even and fine grind” is NOT super important and actually detrimental to the flavor.
Thanks for that trip down memory lane. Back to the topic at hand.
Once I had zeroed on a grind (mixed modality) and roast, I then played with dosage or how much to use for a given amount of water. What I very quickly determined was that coffee ratios and times made, to my tastes, thin and insipid cups. What do you do? You start going in one direction until you see a pattern so I started increasing brew times and it became obvious the cup quality dropped fast. Armed with that data I increased the cocoa to water ratio, decreased the brewing time and little by little I started liking the cup more and more.
And if you are paying attention, you’ll note that when the customer above reground the brewing cocoa to look like coffee, low and behold it, the flavor suffered. And using less cocoa also did not work for them. Huge surprise huh? Clearly not.
Anyway, armed with a ratio and time I liked, just to be sure, I went back to verify a more consistent grind, either finer or courser was not better, and that remined true. A mixed modality grind brewed for a short time, with plenty of agitation, and a high cocoa to water ratio gave me a cup I consistently liked regardless of roast level and so that is where I get this:
“Your tastes may vary but I recommend starting with the following proportions and times: 4 T/8 oz boiling water Steep 5 minutes”
And to be really honest, I tend to prefer 6T for about 3 minutes but at some point it felt like I was telling people to use more cocoa just for the sales so, yeah, I brought the recommendations down a little so they were a touch more approachable while still giving a fine cup.
What is interesting and self-affirming is that over the years I’ve had more converts than I can count that started with another company due to marketing and shifted to Chocolate Alchemy for the flavor. Some even told me that although 4T / cup was good, 6-7T was more to their taste. No comment is needed.
That is all I have. Here are the short take aways.
Take or leave my brewing recommendations. I won’t be hurt.
Use more cocoa than you would coffee.
Don’t steep too long
Visually appealing grind does not make an appealing cup
Brewing cocoa isn’t coffee. Try not to apply the same criteria.
And if you find you love the taste of 2T ground really fine and steeped for 10 minutes, more power to you. We can agree to disagree over a cup brewed how we each like it.
Ciao.