Hot chocolate powders, the kind you stir into hot milk, are not created equal. The vast majority are mediocre, too many are awful, not nearly enough are acceptable. But things are changing here in Australia. We have a growing number of choices here, not just us as consumers, but, perhaps more importantly, choices for all of our world-famous baristas who, too often, put incredible amounts of care into their coffees and not an ounce of love into their hot chocolates.
This is where Grounded Pleasures comes in. While this family-owned business based in Ballarat has been offering a selection of hot chocolate powders for baristas and consumers since 2005, Craig’s background isn’t in chocolate but in coffee. His family had a café in the early 90s in Camberwell in Melbourne where they would grind and make coffee. He ended up owning and managing the café. “We’d have varieties of coffee from over 30 single origins around the world and I loved assessing the different flavour profiles of all these coffees.” This was before the so called third wave coffee movement and Craig and his father were running coffee workshops and even ended up writing the manual on how to make espresso and training baristas around the country.
Things started shifting in the early 2000s when chocolate popped into his head “I started thinking, why hasn’t the café owner thought about what a great hot chocolate is? It is so forgotten and these people that go into a café looking for a great hot chocolate just get neglected. Hot chocolate could be one of the most flavourful things we could have.” In 2005 he started an internet coffee business with a friend and decided this was the time to include a good hot chocolate option for cafes. Pretty soon hot chocolate became the focus and Grounded Pleasures Drinking Chocolates was born.
A focus on flavour
The product might have changed, but his focus hasn’t. “I just love where flavour comes together with people and growing things and the different patches of Earth that have different characteristics”. He recounts the first time he had a glass of wine with this dad “It was a chardonnay and I remember asking him if there was peach juice in it because I tasted peaches. I remember that was a revelation.” He soon discovered cacao was the same. “Chocolate is the most flavourful substance we eat with 700+ individual flavour components while coffee has 400 and wine 300. Up until recently you’d still open a book and see mentioned that there are three varieties of cacao but there are more than 30. There is so much written about wine and coffee, why not about chocolate? In great chocolate you taste other complex flavours other than chocolate and we wanted our drinkers to enjoy them too.”
Their first product was a cocoa from Ghana, “It had this wonderful fruity complexity, nice berries and a lovely long sustained aftertaste that just hit and I thought this is delightful and we should bring it in”. They’ve had other single origins over the years including a Tanzanian (with notes of butterscotch) and more recently a Peruvian hot chocolate (orange, red berries, and hints of caramel). “We’d love to see cafes start offering customers a regularly changing menu of single origin hot chocolates in the same way that they currently offer single origin coffees.” Today if you visit your local café, you may be offered the option to taste one of Grounded Pleasure’s flavoured blends “Chocolate is a fantastic vehicle for other flavours and emphasizes and heightens the flavours of other things”. Their range currently includes French mint, Sicilian oranges, cinnamon spice, vanilla bean, Chilli and their newest addition, pink salt caramel.
The Realities of Sourcing
Craig travels extensively to the sourcing locations and focuses on developing long term relationships with his suppliers. “We also need to ensure that we get a good quality cacao that is clean and safe. We need to know its story”. But sourcing quality cacao can be a challenge. “Most of the world’s cocoa production is dominated by a handful of big companies that blend any interesting cocoa with bad cocoa and make a mediocre cocoa. It is seen as a real commodity and the focus is on bringing out the chocolate flavour rather than the range of other flavour profiles naturally present in different cocoas. Just finding producers that could isolate interesting batches where you could taste something other than cocoa was a challenge.”
Another challenge is consistency in cacao flavour over time. The quality and flavour profiles of the final chocolate are impacted substantially by what happens to the beans before they even reach Grounded Pleasures “Bitter cacao is a processing fault, or means the cacao is not fermented correctly.” Proper fermentation is essential for all cocoa as it converts the really bitter enzymes into softer more palatable ones. It also just like anything fermentated be it beer, wine or coffee it results in a whole array of complex delicious flavours and aromas.
As cocoa is an agricultural product there are always seasonal differences sometimes these can be quite pronounced. For example, after a few years, the cacao they were sourcing from Ghana to make their African Red hot chocolate, started tasting differently so they would add Ecuadorian cacao in to lift up the fruit notes “we changed the name because it really wasn’t African red anymore, but it is now our Original drinking chocolate and still our most popular”.
Quality isn’t the only challenge though. Political issues, truck driver strikes in origin countries, extreme weather, there are constantly challenges sourcing material. “The key is to spread your risk around and not source from just one place.” But even when you do this, there are still risks. “Take vanilla for example. Several years ago the price of vanilla shot up from 100$ to 800$ a kilogram because of a massive drought in Papua new Guinea and two hurricanes in Madagascar.” After a tsunami in Indonesia the price of nutmeg, used in their popular Chai, spiked overnight. “Don’t we have native nutmeg in Australia?” Sophie adds in. I see the wheels turning… one of Craigs many experiments is a hot chocolate using native ingredients “strawberry gum powder, wattle seeds but we are still tweaking”. Craig always has a lot of different cocoas and experiments on the go at one time, tweaking them constantly until he gets them just right. This focus on quality extends to the other ingredients added to their hot chocolates “We tasted over 30 natural peppermint oils for our mint hot chocolate before finally settling on an incredible one made by a perfume maker in the South of France.” Apart from whatever flavour is added, their hot chocolates include only two ingredients: cocoa and Australian sugar, “we want the cocoa to shine and have the interesting characteristics come out.”
Hot Chocolate in Cafes
I spent over an hour in Grounded Pleasures headquarters, a renovated warehouse that has been transformed into a bright and beautiful Instagramable space where they host events and hold barista training. Craig presented me with a steady supply of hot chocolates to sip, a chai (one of their most popular products), a handful of their incredibly addictive locally made marshmallows (really…dangerously so) pink and white marshmallows and then a small bowl of their raw cocoa nibs. “Raw cacao isn’t truly raw because it has been fermented. But usually, raw cacao is very dense and harsh. It’s when you roast it you start the mallard reaction that further reduces the bitter enzymes and makes it more palatable and brings out the more interesting flavour characteristics. But these raw cocoa nibs are different, they taste so good”. The nibs are gone before he finishes his explanation.
I share with Craig and Sophie my frustration at not being able to find good hot chocolates in cafes when my husband has a selection of dozens of amazing coffees everywhere he goes.
“Hot chocolate drinkers have been treated with disdain for such a long time and not ever thought about. Because of that, few people come into a café and drink hot chocolate.” Ground Pleasures is looking to change this and find that a growing number of cafes are willing to have this conversation. “Where we sell, in cafes, is my home, my native habitat. I am a barista so being able to talk to baristas about the hot chocolate or the cocoa that you are drinking in terms of a great coffee or great single origin will fire up their minds.” One of the challenges, apart from a lack of awareness of just how good a hot chocolate can be, is that baristas already have a long list of menu items, including a growing number of different milks and often don’t want to further complicate the situation “But to me it can be very simple, and we have designed Grounded Pleasures to make it easy for baristas to use, but also for people at home”. Craig invites baristas in, introduces them to the products and how to explain them to consumers. “I’d like them to tell customers about the different cocoas and why it is unique.”
How to Prepare Grounded Pleasures
One tablespoon (or two if you are me) in one cup of quality milk (or alternative). Heat the milk slowly at low heat. Add one tablespoon (or two if you are me) and whisk vigorously until the chocolate dissolves. You can also stir one tablespoon with a small amount of water into a paste and then pour that into a cup of cold milk and stir for a decadent Ice chocolate.
In addition to their hot chocolate range, Grounded Pleasures also sells organic panela, cocoa powder, PNG vanilla and vanilla extract and raw organic cocoa nibs. Grounded Pleasures is available at cafes and shops around the country, online and now in the US.
To learn more visit https://www.groundedpleasures.com.au and follow them on instagram (Sophie is an amazing photographer) .
