The Coffee Chocolate Bars of Goodnow Farms
by David Nilsen
At Goodnow Farms in Massachusetts, owners Monica and Tom Rogan love coffee almost as much as they love chocolate, and they’ve brought the two together in creative ways in a range of bars.
“It was really hard to make just one, so we made three,” joked Monica when we spoke recently for an episode of the Bean to Barstool podcast.
2 Unique Central American Bars
Each of Goodnow’s coffee chocolate bars is a unique concept, and showcases the interplay between cacao and coffee in different ways.
El Carmen with Coffee Crunch is a 69% dark chocolate from Goodnow’s Maker’s Choice series. The bar is truly a single origin bar, using cacao and coffee grown very near to each other in Nicaragua. The bar uses cacao from Cacao Bisiesto in Nicaragua, grown just outside the town of Matagalpa. The coffee is grown just 25 kilometers away in Jinotega. El Recreo Coffee in Boston grows the coffee on their family farm there.
The beans are coarsely ground and then directly incorporated into the bar, yielding a fairly bold coffee impression initially. As the bar melts further, the dominant flavor movers into fudge and dark chocolate brownie, with a hint of burnt caramel.
Las Palomas Coffee bar similarly combines a coffee and a cacao from a shared growing region, but with very different processes and results. The Rogans partnered with George Howell Coffee to source coffee beans from Huahuatenango, Guatemala, because they loved the delicacy of the brewed coffee.
“When we were drinking it, we thought this would be perfect with our Asochivite cacao from Guatemala,” says Monica.
Rather than using the coffee beans directly, Goodnow employs a technique more commonly used when incorporating spirits or other beverages into chocolate: they soaked the cacao nibs in the brewed coffee itself, then dry them out and continue with the chocolate making process to yield a 77% cacao dark chocolate. The result is more subtle than many coffee bars, and the lines between the flavors of the cacao and the coffee are more blurred.
The Las Palomas coffee is very delicate, with acidic, fruity notes, and the Asochivite cacao has a similar gently vibrance; together they yield flavors of berries, honey, lily, and honeysuckle.
Steeped In Memory
The final coffee bar from Goodnow Farms seeks to recreate a familiar coffee drink, as well as the moments from Monica’s life she associates with that drink’s comforting flavors.
Cafe con Leche from Goodnow’s Maker’s Choice line uses Boyaca cacao from Colombia along with Barrington Coffee’s Ketiera coffee, grown by a woman’s cooperative in the Sumatra highlands. The 63% dark milk bar is made with sweet, creamy whole milk powder to recreate the flavors of the titular coffee drink.
More than just evoking a coffeeshop classic, the bar evokes fond memories for Monica of her time working as a hotel hostess in Costa Rica.
“I would wake up with 6 a.m. crew, and I would drink my cafe con leche as the jungle was waking up,” She recalls. “I loved that part of my day and how it tasted. I remember thinking, I want to craft a bar that reminds me of that flavor, waking up with a steaming jungle and drinking our cafe con leche.”
The bar offers a gentle impression of the coffee, leaning on the creaminess of the milk to provide comforting, familiar flavors. Every time she tastes it, Monica remembers those mornings in the jungle.
“All of these flavors, they come from different places, but when they play right together, it just reminds you of experiences you’ve had,” she says.
All three coffee bars are available now on the Goodnow Farms site. You can also read more about their spirits-infused bars here, and listen to our full interview with Monica below.