Cleveland Chocolate, Noble Beast Brewing, & a Delicious Partnership

By David Nilsen

Cleveland Chocolate Company’s chocolate shop is a little off the beaten path in the eponymous Ohio city on Lake Erie, and founder and chocolate maker Rebecca Hess similarly took a less-traveled path on her way to making bean to bar chocolate. Toward the end of her career as a chef—first in fine dining and then as a personal chef—Rebecca became curious about the fresh cacao pods showing up with her fruit orders. She decided to try her hand at fermenting her own raw cacao beans in her home kitchen. 

“The fermentation process typically happens at origin in hot, tropical climates,” she explains. “I was making as much of a traditional fermentation experience as possible in the dead of winter in Cleveland.”

After further adventures in home chocolate making, she eventually decided to start Cleveland Chocolate Co. She’s no longer fermenting beans herself (sourcing the finished product through Uncommon Cacao), but that leaves time for plenty of other fun experiments, including partnering with excellent cross-town brewery Noble Beast.

Noble Beast is perhaps best known for their classic European ales and lagers and their hype-worthy IPAs, but a few times a year founder and head brewer Shaun Yasaki and his team will take the plunge on big, high-concept adjunct stouts. In recent years, they’ve been working with Rebecca’s cacao for versions using chocolate. 

The relationship began organically—Rebecca is a friend and former colleague of Noble Beast chef James Redford. Cleveland Chocolate Co. launched just before the pandemic started in 2020, and the Noble Beast taproom was their first wholesale account for their chocolate bars. It was natural to begin providing cacao nibs for chocolate beers such as The Baker’s Russian, Peacemaker, and Cookies & Milk Stout. Cacao selection for these beers follows common guidance for beers of this type: rich, fudgy, classically “chocolatey” origins.

Listen to my conversation with Rebecca & Shaun here:

“We've used Ghana a handful of times,” Rebecca explains. “For the Imperial Stouts they've been brewing, our Ghana origin really works well for the real fudgy profile that they're looking for. One of the times we did use the Pisa Haiti cacao as well. I grew up on a blueberry farm, and the flavor profile with this one is full of blueberry, vanilla, and hazelnut.”

Shaun didn’t have a lot of familiarity with bean to bar chocolate prior to this relationship, but he can’t say enough about the quality of the cacao he gets from Cleveland Chocolate.

“It's really nice to be able to work with Rebecca and say, ‘here, here's what we're doing. What do you recommend? What will give us these flavors?’” he says. “Those nibs are incredible and in a matter of days, we're just getting this incredible fudge character coming out of the beer that really pulls together a lot of the malt elements and all the other adjunct flavors we're adding as well.”

The Baker’s Russian was a 12.3% Imperial Stout brewed with roasted marshmallows, roasted coconut, and cacao. The beer was the result of a voting poll in the local Facebook beer group.

“The Baker’s Russian was definitely my favorite,” says Rebecca. “It wasn’t too over the top with sweetness, just a really nice balance.”

The Peacemaker is an 8.5% coconut, vanilla, and chocolate Stout, and Cookies & Milk Stout is an annual Christmas release is brewed with vanilla and oats and leans heavily on Cleveland Chocolate’s cacao to emulate a rich chocolate chip cookie.

Shaun says he had previously used generic cacao nibs he ordered online, but didn’t get the same intense fudginess he now gets from Rebecca’s. He steeps the nibs in the finished beer during secondary fermentation.

“We get a pretty nice flavor contribution by day three,” he observes. “We have not found that they over-extract. We haven't picked up any unwanted bitterness or anything like that. So if we have the time, they'll stay in for probably a little over a week.” 

These bold dessert stouts have proven to be popular seasonal releases at the cozy Noble Beast taproom. Rebecca loves this avenue for cacao to express itself, but her first love will always be the clear-voiced opportunity for an origin to share its secrets in bar form.

“I think that each chocolate can say something different in each of its own settings,” she reflects. “I think it's more of what you're looking for it to say to you. The origins really impact the flavor so much and you can essentially sit on your couch and take a trip around the world with chocolate.”