Violet Sky & Cloud Walking Coffee Chocolate
By David Nilsen
Coffee and chocolate have a lot in common. Both are made from the seeds of fruits grown in warm climates. Both are agricultural crops often grown by family-owned farms. Both undergo a laborious manual harvest and a (usually) spontaneous fermentation, and both—with rare exceptions on the cacao side—undergo a roasting process before their final transformation.
They offer complementary flavors, and are even used together in some beverages, desserts, and chocolate bars. Both are massively misunderstood at the consumer end of the supply chain, and share many of the same challenges and opportunities at origin.
Hans Westerink at Cloud Walking Coffee & Violet Sky Chocolate in South Bend, Indiana, is one of several makers—including Onyx Coffee Lab, Puchero Chocolate, and many others—working with both ingredients and bringing them together in creative ways.
Hans got started roasting coffee for a very practical, pedestrian reason: he already had the roaster for processing cacao for bean to bar chocolate. Hans founded Violet Sky in 2014 and has been making distinctive craft chocolate bars for close to a decade. He loved coffee too, and learning to roast his own not only provided a new product line to sell, but allowed him to launch a coffee shop in 2021 to sell both coffee and chocolate.
Despite the similarities between coffee and cacao—and the shared roaster—learning to roast coffee was not an easy transition for him, regardless of his years of experience with roasted cacao. Coffee, he says, is far more finicky.
Coffee has a narrower window in terms of roasting than cacao does,” he explains. “It was pretty stressful to have to do it every week and feel like what I was putting out wasn't what I wanted.”
He had high expectations for himself, which led to a frustrating year and a half of dissastifying results before he felt fully comfortable with the coffee roasting process. The labor and patience at Cloud Walking have been worth it.
Despite both being equatorial crops often grown in the same regions, cacao and coffee are rarely grown together because they thrive at different elevations, with coffee thriving on hillsides from 2,000-6,000’ above sea level and cacao favoring much lower altitudes. It’s rare for farmers to have enough arable land of the right elevations to grow both crops, but it is possible.
>On the economic side, both crops face similar challenges, though quality coffee is years ahead of cacao in terms of market development. While this creates challenges for cacao, Hans does see some advantages to this still-forming fine flavor cacao trade.
“I do think sometimes there's an overemphasis on numbers like the Q grade for coffee,” says Hans, referencing the industry standard grading scale that sets prices for coffee lots. No such scale exists for cacao, and while this can make purchasing more uncertain, it doesn’t pigeon-hole cacao lots in the same way.
“Natural-processed coffees will always get rated lower because they have more ‘defects’,” says Hans, explaining one potential downside of this established system. “Those are my favorite coffees though, but they’re never going to get ranked as high just because that's the way it works. Maybe the cacao industry is a little bit more creative because it's not so set in stone. It's more like people can do whatever they want and think outside the box more easily because it's so young.”
He says both crops are still very misunderstood by American consumers, but he sees more need for education on the chocolate side than with coffee. He cites Starbucks and rise of artisan coffee and the 1990s and 2000s as instrumental in helping consumers to not only respect the beverage, but to be willing to pay what it’s worth. Many consumers still struggle to understand why good chocolate is so much more expensive than the supermarket candy bars they’re used to.
Hans says he loves purchasing multiple cacaos and coffees from the same region to learn about them and show his customers the range of flavors within a country.
“Colombia isn't just Colombia, Guatemala isn't just one thing,” he explains. “They have so much variety and in every country and even within a region, they can grow vastly different crops. It's not just the country, it's the varietals and the processing and the way it's handled the whole time.”
He’s recently been excited about Colombian coffee, and Cloud Walking currently has a pink bourbon coffee from the country that he describes as “beautiful and delicate and floral.” To help his customers recognize the range of flavors from the region, he’s offered up to four different Colombian coffees at one time.
Coffee and chocolate work together beautiful in both liquid and solid formats. Coffee drinks with chocolate and chocolate bars with coffee are both popular in their respective markets, and it was only natural for Hans to bring his passions together.
“Whatever drink we have, we can make it into a chocolate bar,” he says, giving as example a recent latte-inspired chocolate bar and a mocha drink using cacao nibs that were both offered in the cafe. When discussing coffee chocolate bars like his recent Honduras Monte Nevado bar, Hans says the process isn’t all that complicated. The coffee is added directly to the melanger (a machine that grinding cacao nibs down to liquid with a very smooth texture) along with some extra cocoa butter to make the mixture liquid enough.
“It takes some extra time, but it will grind it to the point there’s no texture anymore and it’s just as smooth as regular chocolate,” he says. The finished bars contain up to 15% coffee.
I asked Hans if he felt working with cacao and coffee scratched the same creative itch for him, or if he felt they provided different satisfactions for his curiosity.
“I think they're different,” he responded after a moment. “For cacao, it's more the whole process and there's all these little decisions made the whole time. It’s this whole three to four day process of little decisions that lead up to the final product. Coffee just comes down to this 10 to 12 minutes of the roast and that’s it. It's less work, but it's more little things to think about and it’s easier to mess up.”
In both cases, Hans loves the process of taking an agricultural product and turning it into a delicious consumer experience. He takes his responsibility to growers seriously in taking the literal fruit of their labor and coaxing the best possible flavors from it far away from where it was grown.
“The creative side of chocolate making and coffee is just tweaking those raw products to get them where you think they're best,” he reflects. “The transformation and the joy of getting this raw product and then seeing the end product and just being really satisfied with the flavors we were able to pull out of it—that's the whole thing that we're trying to do.”