Chocolate Liqueur: Everything You Need to Know

Chocolate liqueur is not a new product. In fact, humans’ first interaction with chocolate was likely not only in beverage form, but in fermented beverage form, meaning that products such as crème de cacao and chocolate liqueur aren’t so far off from the origin of chocolate consumption.

According to a 2017 book by award-winning science author HP Newquist entitled The Book of Chocolate: The Amazing Story of the World’s Favorite Candy, the Mesoamericans (from what is now present day Mexico) believed that the cacao bean was a gift from the god of wisdom, so naturally humans have always been fixated on finding the most efficient means to ingest it.

Chocolate: the beverage

Spirits scholar and maker of a newly released, Mayan-inspired chocolate liqueur called Cocoa Inferno, Renato Vicaro explains how the “god of wisdom” mythology wasn’t so far off of what we now know scientifically about the benefits of chocolate: “Modern research has shown that chocolate’s benefits are not limited to pleasure coming from its delightful taste; an increasing number of studies indicate its positive impact on the mood, thanks to serotonin and the importance of endorphins, and also appears to be useful against Alzheimer's development.”

Today, drinking chocolate is still the most efficient means of enjoying its effects, and chocolate as a beverage knows many forms: from chocolate tea, mocha, Italy’s chocolate-topped espresso known as bicerin, hot chocolate, and molten drinking chocolate, to alcoholic chocolate beverages such as chocolate liqueur and crème de cacao. Of note, and not at all confusing, chocolate liquor (versus liqueur) refers to liquid chocolate mass—an important stage in processing chocolate for consumption—that is not alcoholic. Here, we focus on the spiritous: everything you need to know about chocolate in alcohol form.

Chocolate Liqueur History

Chocolate was introduced to Europe from Central America by way of various explorers employed by European courts in the late 16th century. According to Vicario:

The Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a team of indigenous grammarians, scribes, and painters completed decades of work on an extraordinary encyclopedic project entitled “General History of the Things of New Spain,” now known as the Florentine Codex (1575–1577.) According to the Codex, as Padre Bernardino’s superior was returning from a trip to the Americas, he stopped to visit the Cardinal Ferdinando dei Medici, (who later became the Grand Duke of Tuscany before returning to Spain,) and gave him his 12 logbooks of the trip, translated from Indio to Spanish, which gave accounts of the uses of cocoa and chocolate.

This introduction of chocolate to European culture is where it is believed sugar enters chocolate’s storied history, and along with it, drinking sweetened chocolate, rather than fermented and bitter chocolate, became fashionable by Europeans not long after.

From there it was a short leap to sweetened chocolate in spirit form, which one source puts as early as the mid 1600s, though most reports of chocolate and liquor together pick up steam around the late 1700s and early 1800s. Wine was also an early vehicle for incorporating both chocolate and alcohol, especially fortified wines such as port and sherry. Now dozens, if not hundreds of brands of various chocolate-based spirits exist, with both chocolate liqueur and crème de cacao labels.

Chocolate Liqueur vs. Crème de Cacao

The primary challenge in understanding the difference between chocolate liqueur and crème de cacao is that these terms aren’t highly regulated, and any number of processes may be used to develop them.

Crème de cacao is a form of chocolate liqueur, in that it is an alcoholic, chocolate-based product that contains a certain amount of sugar, but in some places the usage of these two terms seems interchangeable. In French, “crème” indicates the mandatory presence of sugar, as does liqueur, but does not indicate any dairy matter—although chocolate cream liqueurs, which do contain dairy, are also popular forms of chocolate liqueur.

Both crème de cacao and chocolate liqueur may be made by the distillation of cocoa beans or cocoa nibs into a chocolate-scented spirit to which sugar is added, but that may not contain any appreciable chocolate matter. Percolation or maceration are also commonly employed techniques, where a neutral base spirit, (or in some cases even whiskey,) is steeped in or brewed with cacao beans or cocoa nibs for a spirit that technically contains some chocolate material, but that still may be clarified or clear.

Other chocolate-based liqueurs might have finished chocolate blended into a base spirit, typically including emulsifiers, and that tend to have a higher viscosity. These types of spirits often also employ cocoa butter, or chocolate’s life partner, vanilla, in the blend.

Chocolate-infused whiskey is also on the rise, but that does not qualify as a liqueur due to its lack of sugar content.

In terms of the most typical, functional usages of these two terms, crème de cacao is more commonly used to describe clear or clarified spirits, which are more often (though not exclusively) used in cocktails, whereas chocolate liqueur typically describes a thicker elixir of spirits and chocolate blended together that is typically drunk by itself, (though not exclusively) whether neat or over ice.

Chocolate Liqueur Today and Brands You Should Know

According to Holger Huegelsberger, International Sales Director for Austrian chocolate cream liqueur brand, Mozart, chocolate liqueur in Austria and Europe went through a phase were it was mostly purchased as a tourist souvenir, but has been increasing in popularity in the last several decades, both in Austria and worldwide, due to the rising popularity of craft spirits in general, and also in cocktails.

The Chocolate Martini, which utilizes chocolate liqueur, actually predates the wildly-popular Espresso Martini by several decades, having been invented by Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor in 1955 on a filming location. While chocolate liqueur or crème de cacao function frequently in dessert cocktails, many modern cocktails also employ them as an ingredient to add depth, or to riff on non-chocolate, non-dessert classics. Other cocktails which employ chocolate spirits in their recipes include the Brandy Alexander, S’mores Old Fashioned and Pink Squirrel.

Some well-recognized brands of both crème de cacao and chocolate liqueur expressions include Hotel Chocolat Classic Chocolate Cream, a NY International Spirits Competition Double Gold 2022 winner, as well as Mozart, OM, Godiva, Liqueur Fogg, Tempis Fugit, Marie Brizard, and Giffard.