I believe introductions are in order. I’m Alchemist John and I’m a maker, and I don’t consider it a problem.

I’ve been having a blast with fermentation for over three decades at this point. I have done all sorts of fermentations — beer, wine, sake, mead, bochet, and concoctions and elixirs that don’t quite fit into any category — like the smoked imperial elderberry braggot, or was that an imperial smoked stout with honey and elderberries, or was it an elderberry metheglin with smoked malt? See what I mean? 

I also founded a company called Chocolate Alchemy some 18 years ago in case you were wondering why I call myself Alchemist John. There we teach people how to make chocolate from cocoa beans (more on that later) and recently we have been supplying a lot of small, medium, and large breweries with cocoa nibs to add to their various chocolate beers.

All this is to say I’m no stranger to combining things and seeing what you get. Today we are going to dig in and dive deep into several ways you can get chocolate flavor into your brews — what works, what doesn’t, and why.

Personally, I find the why is very important and with that arrow in your proverbial quiver you can save yourself from going down a multitude of dead-end paths that are fraught with inherent issues. To that end, welcome to the lecture portion of our class.

Did you know chocolate is a fermented food? It is. Chocolate as we think of it has only been around a few hundred years but cocoa has been consumed for thousands of years in various forms. Now some of you are already saying I should have said cacao, but I didn’t on purpose as to my mind (and others will disagree, of course) they are the same thing and the only difference is language and given that languages evolve, a review of the origin of chocolate and cocoa and cacao are in order.

What’s in a Name?

So what is it? Cocoa? Cacao? Cacoa? The terminology can be a little confusing but it really doesn’t need to be. A lot of people try to be fancy and use cacao when referring to unprocessed cocoa and cocoa that comes after that. Others don’t call it cacao if it is raw. I mainly want to clarify this so you don’t think you have to pass on some cocoa nibs when they are labeled cacao nibs. For me, the terms go like this:

Cacao: Short for Theobroma cacao, the scientific name for the plant that we eventually get chocolate from. 

Cocoa: The English term for the seeds that come from Theobroma cacao. It also can refer to any product up to chocolate, usually with an adjective, e.g. cocoa bean, cocoa powder, cocoa nib. Cocoa on its own is frankly ambiguous, so let’s try not to use it. Similarly, lots of people like to say cacao nibs, which sounds a bit pompous and is incorrect unless of course your native tongue’s word for cocoa is cacao (like Spanish) or you are speaking one of those languages. Let’s also try not to say that either.

Cocoa bean: The seed of the Theobroma cacao, whether it is raw, fermented, or roasted.

Cocoa nib: The interior of a cocoa bean, broken along natural fissures, that has had the outer protective shell or husk removed. The process of removing the husk is called winnowing.

Chocolate (noun): Etymologists have traced the origin of the word chocolate to the Aztec word xocoatl, which refers to a non-sweetened drink made from cocoa beans. The Latin name for the cocoa tree, Theobroma cacao, means “food of the gods.” Many modern historians have estimated that chocolate has been around 1,500–2,000 years, but recent research indicates it could be even older, some pushing it out as far as 5,000 years. The modern product is produced from grinding up fermented, roasted cocoa nibs with sugar to produce a smooth (in most cases) and luscious delight (you know what chocolate is).

Chocolate (adj): Anything that cocoa or chocolate (n) has been added to or has had things added to it that make it no longer chocolate (n). Examples are chocolate ganache (cream is added to chocolate), chocolate cake (chocolate is added to the cake), and of course chocolate beer.

Cocoa butter: The fat that comprises 50–55% of the cocoa bean.

Cocoa powder: The finely ground solids that remain after cocoa beans are pressed to remove the cocoa butter.

When most people hear the word chocolate, they picture a sweet bar, a truffle, or maybe a cute hollow milk chocolate bunny. That, though, has only been the case for the last 10% of chocolate’s long history. Before that it was strictly a drink, and sugar didn’t have anything to do with it. I first discovered this in my teens when I tried making what was put out there as traditional Aztec hot chocolate as presented by Jeff Smith, The Frugal Gourmet. It combined (if my memory is right) chicken stock, cocoa powder, cinnamon, and Tabasco sauce. Sadly, it was truly horrific. In the decades since then I now can look back and know why it was so bad (my first fault was using low-grade cocoa powder).

The Chemistry of Chocolate

Making chocolate is involved. In many ways it is as complex as brewing beer. I mentioned previously chocolate is fermented. More specifically, the fruit or pod from the cocoa tree Theobroma cacao is split open and the seeds (the cocoa beans) are scooped out and piled together until they start to naturally ferment, converting natural sugars to ethanol and then into acetic acid. Over the 3–8 days this takes, a bunch of chemical and physical changes occur in the cocoa bean. Generally speaking, pre-cursor chemicals are produced that, upon roasting, produce the signature flavor and aroma we think of as chocolate. Other compounds are broken down and bitterness and astringency are greatly reduced. The beans are then dried and made available to chocolate makers. The cocoa beans are then roasted to develop those chocolate flavors in addition to sterilizing them.

Unlike most beer fermentation, the fermentation of cocoa makes use of many different yeast and fungus strains, most of which would lead to horrible contamination in beer. I can’t stress enough how important it is to use roasted beans or nibs for this reason. After the beans are roasted, they are winnowed to remove the husk. The cocoa nibs are then ground to release the natural cocoa butter present and reduce the particle size of both the cocoa solids and any sugar (plus milk powder for milk chocolate) until the chocolate is smooth to the tongue. It is also worth mentioning that in large industrial chocolate making, refining (particle size reduction) is a separate procedure from another process called conching. In the simplest terms, conching is stirring the heated chocolate so that undesirable compounds can be released. In small-batch chocolate making, melangers (a form of stone grinder) refine and conch at the same time over 1–3 days. After chocolate is made, it is tempered. For the purposes of this article, there is no reason to go into that further.

For those of you who like data, cocoa beans contain about 55% fat. The remainder is approximately 10% complex carbohydrate, no sugar (it has been all fermented out), 20% fiber, and 15% protein. That fat has repercussions in brewing that we will be dealing with in a bit.

Chocolate Beer Styles

Even before the semi-recent craze of making chocolate beers or beers with cocoa, many styles have long been described as having chocolate notes. The use of various roasted and dark malts often gives porters and stouts those hints of chocolate. There are even two specialty malts specifically called chocolate malt and pale chocolate malt that lend the impression of chocolate to the finished beer. Those additions don’t really give strong chocolate flavors though, and brewers in their heady drive to create a greater chocolate flavor started trying to use actual chocolate. Over the years I’ve seen and tasted the results of adding chocolate to the boil, nibs in the mash, powder in both, and various permutations in the secondary . . . and frankly it is kind of bewildering trying to determine what works, what doesn’t, and what makes a horrific mess (spoiler — chocolate bars).

Before we jump into how to add chocolate to your beer, let’s take a passing glance at what styles you can or may want to add them to. The most obvious are the entire host of darker beers — porters, stouts, Belgian darks and dubbels, doppelbocks, old ales, Scotch ales, and even brown ales and bocks. But oh, those are the low hanging fruit (low hanging cocoa pods?). Looking at other beverages, I have personally done chocolate mead (arguably a chocolate metheglin if you count cocoa as a spice), chocolate sake, and chocolate wine all to varying degrees of success. 

What I have not seen but would love to see are some off the wall chocolate beers even if it pushes them outside their traditional parameters. I think a chocolate mild could be great as well as an amber or even a saison. Going out on a limb, a cocoa IPA or Pilsner could be really interesting. How about a cocoa wit? 

“But the color,” I hear you yelling . . . and I’ll say I did give the caveat that it would be pushing style characteristics. I say let imagination be your guide and that there are no taboos. Before we jump into how you can start adding chocolate, I’ll point out that it surprises many people that cocoa and chocolate don’t contribute a lot of color. Unlike many adjuncts, due to cocoa’s really high fat content, and the nature of the rest of the solids in it, there is surprisingly little that wants to extract with water. This is why a chocolate IPA could still end up pale. And that right there is a fine segue into the trials and tribulations of adding cocoa to your beer (or mead, wine, or sake).

Adding Chocolate

There are five different times in which you can add chocolate while you are making beer and believe it or not, at least nine forms you can add to contribute chocolate flavor.

What forms do you have to work with?

• Cocoa nibs (roasted)

• Ground cocoa nibs (roasted)

• Brewing cocoa (ground roasted cocoa beans)

• Cocoa powder

• Chocolate

• Chocolate malt

• Pale chocolate malt

• Chocolate extracts (oil- or alcohol-based)

• Chocolate extracts (water-based)

You can add them to:

• The mash

• The boil

•Primary fermentation

• Secondary fermentation

• At bottling/kegging

If you were to build a matrix of permutations you would come up with 45 different options if tested individually, not even touching upon the source of the nibs you use (yes, that affects flavor as nibs from Ghana will taste different from those from Ecuador, etc.), how much to add, and whether you combine the techniques. For the math geeks out there, there are over 4 million combinations if you start mixing and matching. Lucky for us, many of them can be excluded as they just don’t make any sense, like adding a piece of chocolate at bottling — or really, even adding a bar of chocolate to the secondary. It is just going to float there and not extract any of its decadent goodness. Truthfully, the only reasonable place to add a chocolate bar is in the boil (which still doesn’t mean that you should).

So our guiding principles for chocolate additions are threefold:

• Is it safe to add a certain ingredient to a particular stage of brewing?

• Is it effective to add a certain ingredient at a particular stage of brewing?

• Does the addition actually deliver the chocolate character we want?

OK, so now let’s break down these options with some more practical advice on when and how they can be used in your homebrews.

Cocoa nibs
Nibs behave pretty much anywhere except at bottling. They do fine in the mash, in the boil, and in the secondary. I’m not a fan of them in the primary as even cleaned and roasted nibs can have minor bacterial contamination. In the first two you are going to be sterilizing them and in the later, alcohol levels help significantly in warding off any minor bugs present. In all cases I find treating nibs as a minor adjunct just doesn’t work well. To my taste, they just don’t have enough water-soluble flavor if you add them at a rate of 2–4 oz. (56–112 g) per 5-gallon (19-L) batch. I like a dose rate of 8–12 oz. (225–340 g) per 5-gallon (19-L) batch.

Ground nibs
Generally speaking, I don’t like doing this. When I’ve tried it the costs outweighed the benefits. Yes, you get more flavor by increasing the contact area, but often those flavors are not great and it can lead to issues most everywhere from stuck sparges, clogged chillers, or clogged siphon tubes.

Brewing cocoa
This is ground, whole-roasted cocoa beans. In contrast to the ground nibs, brewing cocoa is coarser and doesn’t seem to lead to as many issues. I don’t recommend it going into the secondary though. The husk just doesn’t play well and you can get some funk there.

Cocoa powder
Use it in the boil or at bottling (boiled with your priming sugar). Cocoa powder requires heat to get it to play well with water. This is the main reason it doesn’t do well in the secondary. It is messy and tends to want to just float and clump. You can try incorporating it in some hot water but I find it doesn’t contribute that much flavor.

Chocolate
The only choice you have for chocolate is putting it in the boil. Everywhere else it will either clog your system or just sit there because it’s cold. Unfortunately, the cocoa butter in the chocolate makes a horrible mess requiring chilling and skimming and even so can decimate head retention.

Chocolate malt & pale chocolate malt
Use in the mash, 4–16 oz. per 5-gallon (115–450 g/19-L) batch. Ten percent of a recipe’s grain bill is generally the highest amount recommended by maltsters.

Chocolate extract (oil- and alcohol-based)
These just don’t want to play well in water when oil-based, and the alcohol-based options are either cost prohibitive or give a very distinct and unpleasant fake extract flavor, in my opinion and experience.

Chocolate extract/slurry (water-based)
These are products like Amoretti and Cholaca. They are super easy to use and can go into the boil, primary, secondary, or even be added right at bottling. To me, these are similar to a cocoa nib slurry and they are catching on with commercial brewers of all sizes. 

On to the Experiments

Now, I know that is both a lot, and at the same time doesn’t tell you a whole bunch. Fear not, I’m not going to leave you there as I’ve done my best to show my work. In preparation for this article, I brewed up 17 different ales (not over 4 million — sorry, not sorry), adding the main contenders to the stage of brewing that I believe gave them the best chance of success. The base ale was a very simple brown ale. I didn’t want the roast character of a stout to overshadow our results. Here is the recipe that I used:

The 5-gallon (19-L) equivalent Brown Ale recipe: 
8 lbs. (3.6 kg) dried malt extract
1 lb. (0.45 kg) Special B malt
1 lb. (0.45 kg) Crystal malt (120 °L)
1 lb. (0.45 kg) caramel malt (120 °L)
1 oz. (28 g) East Kent Golding hops (60 min.)
Wyeast 1728 (Scottish Ale)

I spent the day meticulously dividing out the base recipe, adding the various chocolate additions and fermenting separately. Chart 1, below, shows the variations of each batch split. For all of these, the amounts listed are equivalent to what I would have used in 5 gallons (19 L). The boil and mash times are all one hour.

With myself, a member of my staff, and a couple of local professional brewers who have used cocoa nibs in their brews (go check out Mocha Rhino Suit from Alesong), we tasted all of these and I have to say, the results were not quite what I expected, even knowing that chocolate flavor is notoriously difficult to add to beer (hence this article).

An Excel file with our complete set of tasting notes can be found here.

However, to follow is my take on each one distilled down between the notes and conversation during the tasting. All the beers were tasted blind initially and we went back to discuss them further after the reveal. Spoiler – no one beer came out on top but the combos were found to have the most promise.

1: The control. No particular chocolate, tart, or sour notes were detected in the aroma nor in the taste. The head retention was mediocre.

2. Adding regular roasted nibs to the secondary surprisingly did not add much of anything in the way of chocolate. They added a little tartness and acidity.

3. The addition of cocoa powder to the secondary turned out to cause massive nucleation and the result was a gusher. Setting that aside, the body was a touch better but no one liked it due to the muddy quality it gave to the whole profile.

4. Adding the off-the-shelf Cholaca at bottling didn’t do much. Sure it was easy to add, and it did seem to add a little body, but I would say no real chocolate quality. After the reveal we all wondered if more was needed. I took a stab in the dark at the dosage rate as the company’s only dosing suggestion was to experiment. 

5. The addition of cocoa powder at bottling didn’t do much, but thankfully it also didn’t cause the gusher that adding it in the secondary did. We surmised the boiling of it with priming sugar may have caused a bonding of the particles to prevent nucleation. One person noted a little cocoa in the aroma.

6. Cholaca in the primary showed a little promise, with better and fuller mouthfeel, touches of fruit and roast.

7. Adding nibs to the boil produced a very interesting heady aroma. Everyone noted resin or solvent and not like a defect of fusel alcohols, but more like intense non-descript fruity esters. It also was decidedly sweeter. I have no explanation for that as the final gravity was the same as
all the rest.

8. Adding brewing cocoa to the boil produced mixed results. Some liked it and found chocolate notes, some didn’t care for the overall end product, even with noting the chocolate contribution.

9. Chocolate in the boil . . . I didn’t want to do it as I’ve heard nothing but bad things but in the name of science I went onward. The stories were right. The cocoa butter killed the head, left floaters suspended, and just made for an unappealing beer. No one finished it. The resulting beer tasted nothing like the control nor the chocolate that was used.

10. The addition of cocoa powder to the boil seems to have co-precipitated other things out as it was decidedly thinner than the control and a bit sour/acidic with extra bitterness.

11. I was excited to test out adding darker roasted nibs to the boil. The feedback I’d heard from brewers was that it provides more flavor with the higher roast and that turned out to be true. In this case we think the roast level might have been too high (365 °F/185 °C) and that something more moderate in the range of 300–325 °F (149–163 °C) could be a real sweet spot. Descriptors that came up included: Porter-like, depth of flavor, brownies, and fullness.

12. Just a touch of regular roasted cocoa nibs in the mash added fruity acidity and sourness. Some people noted a touch of chocolate but some did not. The general response was “meh.”

13. The same nibs at four times the level produced a cleaner fruit flavor, fuller body, and was generally liked even if it was not particularly chocolate-like.

14. When the dark roasted nibs were added to the mash, the tasting notes seemed to skew to more fruity and acidic again, losing that depth of flavor that was there when the nibs were boiled. This to me makes lots of sense if you think of making tea at 155 °F (68 °C) vs. making it with boiling water. There is certainly some aroma potential here.

15. It was both a surprise and not when we thought about it that adding traditional chocolate malt to the mash was really clean, added great cocoa notes to the aroma, and different levels/types of chocolate overtones to the beer itself. This beer was quite well received.

16. On the other hand, the addition of only pale chocolate malt was not received as well. Mostly non-descript. The overall conclusion was that pale chocolate malt is probably fine for layering but not as a single addition if chocolate character is the goal.

17. And now, for the finale we tasted one that I tossed the kitchen sink into. Nibs, brewing cocoa, and chocolate malts in the mash, more nibs, brewing cocoa, plus cocoa powder, Cholaca, and chocolate in the boil, yet more nibs and powder in the secondary, plus powder and Cholaca at bottling. It was just a hot mess. Take every slightly negative about the single additions and amplify them. It was muddy, chunky, and just too bitter. Hard pass — don’t do it. It was worth a shot, right? Personally I think the powder and chocolate probably ruined it.

And that my friend concludes our regularly scheduled program . . . but wait, there’s more! I put together at bottling six combinations from the earlier brews, really just going on instinct and, with the exception of that last kitchen sink combo, all showed remarkable promise. The numbers that follow are 50/50 blends with the corresponding batch numbers:

7&11. Dark and regular nibs in the boil added complexity with hints of cocoa and brownies.

11&13.  Dark nibs in the boil and regular nibs in the mash, again, added depth of flavor including cocoa, fruit, and sweetness.

11&14. Dark nibs in both the mash and boil was a real winner for myself and the panel. The combination added roasted notes, very little fruit, cocoa aroma, and some real easy drinking.

12&17. Regular nibs in the boil and the kitchen sink. Hot mess, moving on.

15&16. Finally, when both chocolate malts were mixed the body went up. I found this quite interesting if you keep in mind, since they were mixed, there was only half as much as the originals. Again, the combo was a real winner among our tasters.

As I previously said, no one addition did the trick (at least, to our very high standards) but basically all of the combinations (let’s just agree to forget about the #17 kitchen sink mess) showed more complexity and chocolate aromas, with the chocolate malts and dark nibs really shining. And well, I suspect no one is surprised that some complexity to the grain bill is almost always well received. There is an interesting fact about chocolate flavor that surprises many people. 

There is no one chemical responsible for “chocolate” just like there is not one pure pigment for the color teal. Among some of the more interesting chemicals responsible are those that give boiled cabbage, stale sweat, and old eggs their characteristic smells. To me, this explains quite well why no single addition was as well received as the combinations.

In summary

• Chocolate bars (even high-end chocolate) and cocoa powders are just not worth using to brew with.

• Water-based extracts or slurries and brewing cocoa hold promise, but either price or negative notes (in my admittedly limited experimenting with these types of products) do not have me recommending them.

• You should certainly be adding chocolate malt to your chocolate beers and some pale chocolate malt certainly is not going to hurt.

• A deeper roasted cocoa nib, combined with some regular nibs and traditional chocolate malts, added at various points in your brew is really the way to go. Putting together a recipe to try next, taking what we learned here, it would look something like this:

The 5-gallon (19-L) Equivalent Chocolate Brown Ale recipe:

Mash Grain bill
8 lb (3.6 kg) dried malt extract
1 lb (0.45 kg) Special B malt
1 lb (0.45 kg) crystal malt (120 °L)
1 lb (0.45 kg) caramel malt (120 °L)
8 oz (227 g) chocolate malt
8 oz (227 g) pale chocolate malt
8 oz (227 g) dark roasted (315 °F/157 °C) cocoa nibs

In the boil (60 minutes)
8 oz (227 g) Regular roasted (260 °F/127 °C) cocoa nibs
8 oz (227 g) Dark roasted (315 °F/157 °C) cocoa nibs
1 oz (28 g) East Kent Golding hops (60 min.)
Wyeast 1728 (Scottish Ale)

Secondary Additions (for 2–6 days, tasting daily)
8 oz. (227 g) Regular roasted (260 °F/127 °C) cocoa nibs
8 oz. (227 g) Dark roasted (315 °F/157 °C) cocoa nibs (I used Ancillary Darkness, and they are available as nibs)

The final two things I want to mention that came up a lot during the tasting was that all cocoa nibs are not created equal and that a little counter intuitively slightly fruity and nutty beans tend to work better than ones that are deeply chocolate. As I mentioned, chocolate is not one chemical, but a combination of at least 20, and the more variation you get in there the better chance you have of getting that elusive chocolate coming through. 

The other thing is that this was a medium-strength beer that I used for these test brews (~8% ABV). Alesong reported significantly better results with bigger beers (over 10% ABV) and slightly darker nibs in the secondary for a limited time. The extra alcohol acts as a solvent extract more and they limit the time in the same way you limit the time on brewing a fine tea or French press pot of coffee. More for a shorter time is much better than less and longer as that tends to over-extract sour and acidic compounds that overshadow the good stuff.

Lastly, as a direct response to this article, Chocolate Alchemy will soon be offering* cocoa nibs (maybe a blend) specially roasted at 300-315 °F (149–167 °C) for beer additions, available in all quantities. That’s not (entirely) a sales pitch, but a result of these trials.

*Post article update. We are indeed now offering a special Brewing Blend. In regards to the above options for Regular and Dark roasted nibs, you can of course do that but I’m now recommending the blend. I’ve found you can use a bit less. The above Chocolate Brown Ale recipe would look like this:

Mash Grain bill
8 lb (3.6 kg) dried malt extract
1 lb (0.45 kg) Special B malt
1 lb (0.45 kg) crystal malt (120 °L)
1 lb (0.45 kg) caramel malt (120 °L)
8 oz (227 g) chocolate malt
8 oz (227 g) pale chocolate malt
8 oz (227 g) Brewing Blend cocoa nibs

In the boil (60 minutes)
12 oz (340 g) Brewing Blend cocoa nibs
1 oz (28 g) East Kent Golding hops (60 min.)
Wyeast 1728 (Scottish Ale)

Secondary Additions (for 2–6 days, tasting daily)
12 oz (340 g) Brewing Blend cocoa nibs

Further Reading