Cacao Fruit Pulp in Beer
By David Nilsen
Brewers have long used cacao nibs in a variety of beer styles to create or accent chocolatey flavors. Cocoa Supply, a company started in Ecuador with operations in North America and Europe, is now importing shelf-stable cacao fruit pulp, hoping to turn brewers on to parts—and flavors—of the cacao fruit that have previously been unavailable in North America.
Chocolate is made from the fermented seeds of the cacao fruit, a tree fruit that is cultivated in tropical climates within 20° of the equator all around the world. The fruits are quite large and look like brightly colored football, and inside each fruit is a pale pulp contains numerous seeds. When the fruit is harvested, the pulp is scooped out and the seeds are allowed to spontaneously ferment. Some of the fruit pulp—which can have flavors of passionfruit, lychee, strawberry, and other fruits—is used to provide sugar for the fermentation, but most of it is lost as a waste product. But it doesn’t have to be.
Cacao farmers do find other uses for the fruit pulp—it is delicious straight from the pod, and the pulp itself can be fermented into a type of homebrewed wine or cider for drinking—but its high fermentability combined with the hot, humid conditions in which cacao is typically grown lead to rapid spoilage. Add in the lack of food safety protocols that would be needed to properly handle what is for now a waste product, and commercial harvesting and processing of cacao pulp become too much for a farm to worry about at the height of harvest. That’s where Cocoa Supply comes in.
“Normally we make juice with it, or we make jams or different things, but it’s nor really commercially available normally,” explains Leila Carvajal Erker of Cocoa Supply. “We always thought, ‘Well, that’s a pity,’ because it’s actually very tasty.”
As mentioned above, cacao fruit pulp has a variety of pleasant flavors, as well as a bright tartness and a fairly high sugar content. With the popularity of fruit beers in American craft beer, cacao is an untapped ingredient if it can be safely and sustainably supplied to the industry. Leila is hoping to make her company that source.
Rescuing Flavor & Profit from the Waste Pile
Leila grew up on cacao farms. Her family has worked with cacao for generations, stretching back to the 19th century, but every generation of the family has reinterpreted their relationship with this fruit tree that gives us chocolate. What started with a small cacao farm owned by her great grandmother in the 1880s has grown into a Cocoa Supply, a company that aggregates cacao from many farms and distributes it throughout North America and Europe.
Leila Carvajal Erker
Growing up in Ecuador, Leila remembers visiting the cacao farms that provided beans for Cocoa Supply. It was often her job as a young girl to feed the chickens on these farms, and to keep her dad from making business deals if he and a farmer started sampling the cacao moonshine a bit too convivially. When she first came to the U.S. to attend college in 1996, she was surprised how little her American classmates understood about where chocolate came from.
“Imagine someone saying, “I’ve never seen a pear.’ And you’re like, ‘What? You’ve never seen a pear?’ It was strange,” she recalls. “I realized there was such a gap from where I grew up. Suddenly you see a new perspective. At the beginning I was a bit baffled about how they’d never even thought about it.”
She eventually became a chemical engineer and now lives in the U.S., and has guided Cocoa Supply into its current position as a leading provider of cacao for bean to bar makers and, notably, craft breweries. Breweries using Cocoa Supply’s cacao nibs include Duclaw Brewing, who use the nibs in their popular Sweet Baby Jesus Chocolate Peanut Butter Porter.
Cocoa Supply no longer runs its own farm, but instead collects cacao from around 60 farms and co-ops around Ecuador; the largest of the co-ops itself represents about 1,300 small family farms. Visiting the farms and recognizing how much of the cacao fruit goes to waste gave Leila the idea to come up with a way for the farmers (and Cocoa Supply) to make some extra income from the byproduct, and access to so many farms would allow her the scale to do so sustainably and economically.
“But then comes the part with how do you bring it from the farm [to market] when it ferments so quickly?” wondered Leila. “Once you harvest it, you really need to freeze it immediately. Refrigeration makes it more expensive, more complicated, and less environmentally friendly if you have to keep it cold through all the chain. We need to make it something easy.”
Cocoa Supply eventually developed two processes for making cacao pulp shelf stable without refrigeration: pasteurized puree and freeze-dried powder. The pulp is centrifuged at the point of harvest to separate it from the seeds (while leaving enough for seed fermentation) and is then either freeze-dried on the spot or frozen for transport to a factory, where it is pasteurized and put into baby food-style packets. This is being done on a couple farms now, with more partnerships planned. Not only does this development reduce waste and make a new ingredient available to brewers, it also provides another income stream for small cacao farms.
Brewing with Cacao Pulp
Once Cocoa Supply had samples of shelf-stable cacao fruit pulp, they needed brewers who were willing to experiment with the brand new product. A chance meeting at the Craft Brewers Conference in spring 2023 provided Leila’s first willing guinea pig.
Leila was planning to attend an outdoor get-together happening in conjunction with CBC, but the event got rained out. She took refuge indoors, and happened to sit down by Sam Mosle, head brewer at Wind River Brewing in Pinedale, Wyoming. The pair began talking, and quickly became friends. Sam had brewed beers with cacao nibs in the past, but knew little about how cacao was grown and processed and how chocolate was actually made.
“It was very eye-opening,” says Sam. “I was really interested to see what goes into the fermented cacao beans. I never even knew the pulp existed.”
Fifth Street Brewpub beers brewed with cacao pulp.
Sam agreed to work with samples of Cocoa Supply’s new cacao pulp, opting for the puree form. The brewery’s best-selling beer is the 5% ABV Wind River Blonde Ale, and Sam pulled 12 gallons of the beer from a 20 bbl batch (620 gallons) after it had completed primary fermentation to use in the experiment. He added 165 ounces of pulp—about 10 percent of the beer’s volume—and allowed the beer to go through a secondary fermentation fueled by the sugars in the pulp, which took three additional days. Leila says there are 9 grams of sugar per 100 grams of pulp.
“Our Blonde Ale normally finishes at about 1.35° Plato, where the Blonde with the cacao pulp finished a little bit lower at 1.25° Plato, so 0.1 degree Plato lower,” he explains. “That is probably attributed to its higher fermentability than traditional wort (unfermented beer).”
Plato is a measurement of a beer’s gravity—the weight of the liquid—which indicates how much fermentable sugar is present at various stages. Measuring gravity before and after fermentation will tell a brewer how much sugar has been converted into alcohol, and a simple calculation will then provide the beer’s alcohol content by volume. Adding the highly fermentable cacao pulp resulted in a beer with a lower final gravity—and slightly higher alcohol content—than the base version, a result typical for fruit beers.
The most notable change in the cacao pulp version of Wind River Blonde Ale was in the final pH of the beer. Cacao pulp has an acidic tartness, and this impacted the acidity of the beer.
“Our traditional blonde finishes around 4.4 pH, and the one with the pulp finished at 3.92, so almost half a degree of pH lower,” explains Sam. “It is noticeable when you taste it—there’s a little more tang.”
Sam says that while he likes the results, he wants his next experiment to be with a different beer style. He mentions Hefeweizen and a sour beer style as possible candidates. While the acidity in the Blonde is pleasant, he says it could lead someone to wonder if there were an infection in the beer leading to that subtle souring.
After initially talking with Leila about Cocoa Supply’s new cacao pulp products, I reached out to Jon Naghski, head brewer at Fifth Street Brewpub in Dayton, Ohio (in full disclosure, Fifth Street Brewpub is a Patreon Sponsor of Bean to Barstool). He too was eager to play around with this new ingredient, and requested samples of both the puree and the freeze-dried powder.
Like Sam at Wind River, Jon used the cacao pulp in a classic Blonde Ale. The style provides a simple base that allows the cacao flavor to shine through. On the first batch, he added 95 ounces of the puree to 10 gallons of beer. In a second batch he added just under a pound of the freeze-dried cacao powder to the same amount of beer. Rather than wanting to mitigate the acidity as Sam expressed, Jon decided to lean into it by using acidulated malt as 8% of the total grain bill to accentuate that tanginess.
We sat down after both versions had had time to condition to taste the base beer, both fruited versions, and the cacao samples themselves.
The puree tasted something like peach baby food with a bit more tartness and some banana pudding-like sweetness (Leila says the pasteurization process leads to a bit of sugar caramelization). Fifth Street’s Blonde Ale brewed with the puree had flavors of pale stone fruit and raw cider to complement the bready base. The version brewed with the freeze-dried powder was a touch drier in flavor, with a bit more perceived tartness.
Jon favors the puree version with its rounder profile, but wants to brew a beer with cacao nibs using the freeze-dried cacao powder to layer the cacao flavors. This echoes a wish Leila has often had when tasting lighter beers brewed with cacao nibs alone.
“I’ll actually order [a beer brewed with our cacao nibs] every once in a while when the brewery doesn't even know I ordered it,” she explains. “I have a taste of it, and then at some point I’ll be like, ‘Ah, this would actually also be good with cacao [pulp].”
Explaining Cacao to Customers
One of the challenges inherent in promoting beers brewed with cacao in any format is the lack of public understanding of what cacao even is. As Sam described earlier, most people have no idea how chocolate is made or what it’s made from. If they know the word cacao, they likely don’t know how it is grown or processed. The fruity flavors of cacao fruit pulp will be easily appreciated by a consumer who is willing to try something new, but how do you get someone to order a beer brewed with a fruit they’ve never heard of and maybe can’t pronounce?
Both Jon and Sam think this will have to happen one customer at a time at the point of service.
“I like to educate the servers at the bar so that they know what's going on,” says Sam. “I'll essentially just let them know that, hey, there's a cacao plant. That's where we get cacao beans, and in between the beans there's a pulp, and this pulp is very sweet, and we have experimented with this pulp in this beer and just let them advertise it to the customer.”
The intention is to serve the traditional Blonde in conjunction with this experimental version so customers can see and taste the difference. Fifth Street Brewpub did the same, and the beer sold out quickly.
With the current popularity of fruit beers, cacao fruit pulp presents a lot of opportunities for brewers willing to experiment. This is especially true for paler beer styles in which cacao in nib form is rarely used. Sam mentioned Hefeweizen and sour beers as good candidates. Orpheus Brewing in Georgia (since closed) brewed a 4.5% ABV spontaneous fermentation sour ale with cacao pulp a few years back. Non-alcoholic brewery Athletic Brewing currently has a Citrus Cacao IPA made with cacao fruit juice available to its Athletic Club members.
While consumer education still represents a challenge, the primary barrier to using this delicious fruit—high perishability—has been removed with Cocoa Supply’s new offerings. I’m eager to see what brewers make from this exciting ingredient.