Two New and Unusual Chocolate Liqueurs Worth Seeking Out
While drinking chocolate is about as old as chocolate itself, spirituous chocolate beverages have a history that goes back at least a couple of centuries, beginning around the time when the Europeans got their hands on cacao beans from traders who had traveled in equatorial areas. We recently brought you Chocolate Liqueur 101: Everything You Need to Know About Chocolate Booze, to delineate between chocolate liqueur, chocolate liquor, and crème de cacao. (In short: besides chocolate liquor, which is not actually booze, the lines between chocolate liqueur and crème de cacao are often blurry.)
These types of beverages are not where the bean stops, however, when it comes to incorporating chocolate and alcohol together. Chocolate cocktails and even spiked hot chocolate have held steady in popularity over the decades, but here we look at 2 spirit brands, Heritage Distilling and Vicario Spirits, who employ creative uses of chocolate toward making unique products that don’t neatly fit into any chocolate spirit category.
Various whiskies often include chocolate in their tasting notes, with oak-influenced flavors coming together in an effect close to bittersweet chocolate, so it’s no wonder that the idea of chocolate whiskey is on the rise, especially for the whiskey curious. “We joke that Cocoa Bomb is a gateway whiskey,” says Hannah Hanley, Chief Marketing Officer for Heritage Distilling.
The NY International Spirits Competition 2022 Bronze Winning Cocoa Bomb Whiskey was born of the idea of capturing that “cocoa bomb” experience, whereby a hollow chocolate sphere containing cocoa mix and other accoutrements is melted into a cup of steamed milk to make cocoa, but Hanley insists that the idea of making a chocolate liqueur was never on the table. Heritage Distilling creates whiskey, as well as a number of different spirits and some canned cocktails, but they weren’t trying to enter the liqueur category with a chocolate-inspired selection.
“Whiskey is booming and more than ever people are looking for unique ways to get into drinking whiskey,” says Hanley. “Flavored whiskey especially is one of the biggest growing segments in our industry, and our research shows that most Americans eat chocolate daily,” (author’s note: relatable,) “so we figured, why not make that chocolate in the form of spirits?”
A proprietary chocolate mixture utilizing several chocolates from around the world is blended as a syrup with finished whiskey to create the product, but the sugar content is lower, and the alcohol content higher, than what would typically be found in a liqueur. Cocoa Bomb is thus able to maintain its designation as whiskey rather than a specialty spirit, with the natural vanilla and caramel notes coming from the whiskey acting as a megaphone for the chocolates’ nuances. “Our team of distillers landed on using bittersweet, semisweet, and a little malt to create a chocolate whiskey that is flavorful but not too sweet,” says Hanley, “once someone who typically doesn’t drink whiskey tries it their minds are usually changed about the segment.” Gateway whiskey, indeed. Always trust chocolate to win hearts and minds.
Try Cocoa Bomb in a cocktail wherever you would use whiskey and reduce the syrup content by a bit. It especially shines as a Cocoa Old Fashioned, with orange bitters to further emphasize the chocolate character or in a Manhattan.
Vicario Spirits: Cocoa Inferno
"Heat cannot be separated from the fire, or beauty from The Eternal. The path to paradise begins at the inferno” wrote Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy. So begins the product description of a unique, chocolate and hot pepper liqueur called Cocoa Inferno crafted by South Carolina’s Vicario Spirits.
Janette Wesley and Renato Vicario of Vicario Spirits make excellent spirits and liqueurs, including gin, grappa, brandy, and over a dozen various amari and single-botanical liqueurs. With something of a cult following—they created a coffee liqueur because enough bartenders obsessed with their products asked them to—it was only a matter of time before they dabbled in chocolate with Cocoa Inferno, the latest of their releases.
“I adore excellent chocolate, so I don't know of any other reason necessary to make a chocolate liqueur,” says Wesley, “but we do think that our version will offer a completely different level of taste to mixologists who are looking for an addition to a cocktail that is slightly salty, deeply cocoa, but with a heat that lingers long on the palate.”
Renata Vicario is an amaro scholar, and so is meticulous when it comes to sourcing botanicals for Vicario’s products, and to delving into the history and use of those botanicals. This historical approach to chocolate is what ultimately informed what kind of chocolate liqueur the brand would offer. “We are going back to the origins, from the Olmec, the Aztec, and the Mayan,” says Wesley, “who drank cocoa with their other native plants: hot chili peppers, (we are using our own estate grown Habanero peppers,) vanilla, and allspice.”
In addition to its heat and additional flavoring elements, Vicario’s product is especially set apart from other chocolate-based liqueurs in its use of a very rare (and therefore expensive) chocolate—Criollo—and a lack of emulsifiers, which is otherwise unheard of among chocolate liqueurs. “I wanted to develop a liqueur with what chocolate is in the reality of its historical context, not as a sweet pacifier which would also contain milk,” says Vicario. “There are so many factors that influence the taste of chocolate: terroir, drying, roasting, production, processing, and origin. My first choice was always the Criollo cocoa, because of its specific taste: delicate yet complex, low in classic chocolate flavor, but rich in secondary notes of long duration.”
The result is a spicy chocolate liqueur that, while actually containing rich chocolate matter, comes across on the palate as almost dry, a unique counterpoint to almost anything else available on the market. And so concludes the label description for Cocoa Inferno: “Fire begets glory, as the long tastes linger on the path to paradise.”