IPA Chocolate Bars
by David Nilsen
Despite being by far the most popular family of beer styles in craft beer, IPAs don’t always get a ton of love when it comes to chocolate pairing or collaboration. Because Stouts and Porters naturally have complementary chocolate and coffee roast flavors from their roasted malts, people tend to think of these styles first when pairing with craft chocolate or crossing flavors and ingredients for chocolate beers or beer chocolates. But the fruity hop flavors common to IPAs can work great with or in craft chocolate with a little bit of intentionality.
(Read more about pairing IPAs with craft chocolate and pairing standard-strength Porters & Stouts with craft chocolate.)
Many craft chocolate makers work with beer ingredients to make unique bars, and while IPA isn’t the first style people associate with chocolate, these beers offer remarkable flavor opportunities for makers. Working with IPAs or their ingredients (namely, bold American, Australian, or New Zealand hops) in thoughtful ways can create flavors that are approachable for beer fans and exciting and unexpected for chocolate fans.
Let’s talk very briefly about IPAs and their star ingredient, hops. For convoluted reasons we won’t get into here, IPA stands for India Pale Pale, and is actually a collection of related styles rather than one specific thing. What ties them together is a focus on the aroma and flavors of hops. Hops are the primary seasoning agent in beer, and even though they look like little leafy green pine cones, they’re actually flowers. Depending on how they’re used during the brewing process, hops can produce bitterness or flavor and aroma in a beer, and the quantities and varieties used will determine the types of flavors and aromas produced. Hops can have aromas that are grassy, herbal, earthy, or floral, or they can showcase a wide range of fruity aromas, from citrus to tropical fruits to berries. Hops are used in all beer, but modern IPAs exist more than anything else to highlight these flavors.
Because of their boldness and potential bitterness, hops and the IPAs that showcase them can be difficult to infuse into chocolate. There are several different methods craft chocolate makers have devised for doing so, so let’s look at those now.
Made with IPA
The most direct way to work with IPA flavors in chocolate is to use the actual beer itself. For reasons we don’t have the space to get to here, liquids cannot be used in the chocolate-making process, so brewers seeking to use beer or any other spirit will often soak their cacao nibs in the liquid and then dry those nibs back out and make chocolate with them. The nibs readily absorb flavors and aromas, so this method often lends a potent and recognizable punch of flavor from the drink. This is a difficult proposition for IPAs because of their intensity, especially their often elevated bitterness.
One notable exception is Chocolate Conspiracy’s Double IPA bar. The Double IPA bar is a 75% dark chocolate made by soaking cacao nibs in Level Crossing Soul Rex Double IPA. The beer is brewed with Ekuanot, Azacca, and Strata hops, which provide intense tropical fruit character to the beer. Those flavors subtly lift from the underlying chocolate to provide accent notes, much like the jazz notes emerging from the T-Rex playing an upright bass on the bar’s label. The cacao nibs are soaked in the beer for nine days before being turned into chocolate.
French Broad Chocolate has also made some bon bons using IPA in ganache, sidestepping the liquid-in-chocolate problem.
Made with Hops
Some makers trying to evoke IPA flavors are skipping the beer itself and going straight to the source by using hops (or their derivatives) themselves.
River-Sea Chocolate’s Peach IPA bar is made with Chinook hop extract and oil, along with Palisade peaches. The peaches lead the way, allowing the more citrusy and pines hops to express more subtly.
The need for subtlety here is key—hops can be quite bitter, and a lot of makers who have tried to work with the flowers themselves have ended up with bars with too much planty bitterness. This isn’t bad per se—ertswhile Ratza Chocolate’s Hop Citrus bar used ground-up hop petals, but the resulting bitterness fit in with the company’s focus on herbalism.
Aged in Hops
The most common method I’m seeing craft chocolate makers use for evoking IPA flavors sidesteps bitterness by only using the aroma properties of hops. To do this, the hops themselves never end up being included in the chocolate.
Cacao nibs are about 50% fat, and that fat is highly absorbent of aroma. Makers take advantage of this by aging their finished chocolate bars in beds of hop flowers, allowing the aromas to infuse into the cocoa butter of the chocolate. The bittering compounds in the hops stay behind, and only those beautiful aromas make the jump.
There are numerous examples of makers using this process, and it’s only becoming more common.
Nostalgia Chocolate Hop Aged is made by aging 70% dark chocolate (Kokoa Kamili) in Chinook hops for about three weeks. Owner Tyler Cagwin recently moved from upstate New York—where he had partnered with The Bineyard hop farm—to Charlotte, North Carolina, and I haven’t heard yet if he will revive this bar with another provider.
Somerville Chocolate’s Hops Dark Milk is made by aging a dark milk bar in tropical-leaning hop varieties often found in Hazy IPAs, including Citra, Galaxy, and Mosaic. Recently, they’ve mostly been using Mosaic. Hops Dark Milk bar offers sweet citrus up front, similar to orange creamsicle, before the subtle bitterness of the hops comes forward with a green tea-like flavor.
Other examples of this technique include Qantu Chocolat IPA, TCHO Hoppy Hour, and Fossa Citra IPA.
IPAs aren’t an obvious choice on the surface for craft chocolate, but who needs obvious. Check out these bars, let me know what you think, and let me know if you see other examples out in the wild!
All photos by David Nilsen.