Chocolate Is the Hardest Flavor to Get Right

Chocolate is the hardest flavor to get right in coffee. I didn't expect that when we started sourcing beans, but it's true, and it's part of why Midnight Velvet took longer to land on than almost anything else in the lineup.

Here's the problem. Cocoa is bitter on its own, coffee is already bitter, and most medium roasts carry a little bitterness too. Stack three bitter things on top of each other and you don't get a rich mocha, you get something flat and a little harsh, the kind of flavored coffee that smells better than it tastes. So the flavoring has to work against what you'd expect. It has to soften the cup, not sharpen it. That usually means pairing the cocoa note with something sweeter underneath it, vanilla or a touch of caramel, so the chocolate reads as dessert instead of as one more layer of bitter.

The oil matters too. Flavoring gets added after roasting, as a light coating sprayed onto the bean, and how much oil the bean already has on its surface changes how evenly that coating sits. A darker roast already has more surface oil, so it grabs flavoring unevenly, patchy in spots, over-saturated in others. A medium roast, which is what we use for Midnight Velvet, has a cleaner surface to work with. The flavor sits where it's supposed to, cup after cup, instead of the first scoop from the bag tasting twice as strong as the last scoop.

I used to think flavored coffee was the less serious option. Like it was cheating somehow, compared to a single origin you let speak for itself. I don't think that anymore. Getting a flavor to actually taste like what it claims, mocha that tastes like mocha and not like cough syrup with coffee in it, takes more restraint than I expected going in. It's easier to oversell a flavor than it is to get it right.

We land Midnight Velvet at a point where the chocolate is there but it's not shouting. You should be able to drink it black and still taste coffee underneath the cocoa, not the other way around. A splash of milk brings the chocolate forward a little more, if that's what you're after, without burying anything underneath it.

None of this is really about coffee, if I'm honest. It's about the same thing most of what I care about comes down to: doing a small, ordinary thing with enough care that nobody has to lower their expectations for it. That's most of what hospitality actually is, I think. Not grand gestures. Just getting the everyday thing right so the person on the other end of it feels taken care of, without ever having to ask.

Choose to be kind. Choose to be grateful. Choose to be happy.

— Nina of GiaNina Collective