When we think about cacao, we typically think dark and rich. Brewers have been putting nibs in their porters and stouts for decades.
Cacao fruit, however—which is where we get those seeds for making chocolate—couldn’t be more different from that perception. Its flavors are practically a photographic negative of dark and rich—it’s bright, delicate, fruity, and tart, as if passion fruit and mango had a baby and swaddled it on a bed of watermelon rind.
And, naturally, you can brew with it.
For a long time, brewers and drinkers have known cacao only for its chocolate flavors. As products made from the pulp of cacao fruit become more readily available, that perception is beginning to shift. Adding that brightly flavored pulp to your brewing repertoire is a bit like adding a new color to your box of crayons—and, in short, cacao isn’t just for chocolate beer anymore.
Fruit of the Cacao
Originating in the Americas but now grown around the world, Theobroma cacao is a tropical tree that grows within 20° north and south of the equator. Its fruits are roughly the shape and size of an American football, and their hard, pumpkin-like shells conceal a wet mass of white pulp containing dozens of seeds. That pulp and its juice are edible, delicious, and highly fermentable.
“The fruit tastes amazing,” says Raven Hanna, who grows her own cacao at her home on Hawaii’s big island. Hanna, who has a doctorate in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, is the author of One Cacao Tree, a book about growing and working with cacao as a hobby. “It has this soursop, lychee, lemon-lime taste, and it can vary depending on variety. It’s a sweet-and-sour flavor.”
The trick to brewing with the fruit itself is to capture and preserve it before it ferments—which is something it’s eager to do in the warm, humid climates where cacao grows. Because it ferments so quickly, Hanna says, the fruit is mostly enjoyed only on the farms where it’s grown. Fresh or fermented drinks made from the fruit are common on cacao farms; Hanna also dehydrates the pulp to make fruit jelly at home.
Historically, some indigenous communities in Central and South America likely fermented cacao fruit with corn to make chicha-like beverages—the first cacao beers. Today, the combination of cacao and grain is one that modern brewers are beginning to rediscover.
“You’re saying something has cacao, but then you’re giving someone this bright and fruity beer,” says Jon Naghski, head brewer at Fifth Street Brewpub in Dayton, Ohio. “You get all these really fascinating notes of mango and papaya. It’s like the smaller notes you might pick up in high-quality chocolate.”
So, how can brewers get ahold of some cacao-fruit pulp to experiment with these flavors themselves? The story begins—as it always should with chocolate—on the farm.
Brewing with Cacao Pulp
Leila Carvajal Erker, CEO of Cocoa Supply, grew up on cacao farms in Ecuador. Her family started growing cacao more than a century ago, and in the 1970s they transitioned toward aggregating cacao from other farms in Ecuador. In 2000—under Carvajal Erker’s direction—they started selling this cacao in the North American and European markets. They now supply cacao nibs to many craft breweries.
“The pulp itself is usually a waste product,” she says. “We make juice or jam with it, but it’s not commercially available. That’s a pity because it’s very tasty, but how do you get it from the farm when it ferments so quickly?”
A few years ago, Cocoa Supply began working on ways to preserve the pulp for transport. The company now has two different pulp-based products that can be used in brewing: a freeze-dried powder and a pasteurized purée. Once they’d developed and packaged these products, Carvajal Erker had to convince brewers to give it a try.
One such chance came in May 2022, at the Craft Brewers Conference in Minneapolis. After the rainout of an outdoor event, she went to a taproom to escape the weather. There she found herself sitting next to Sam Mosle, head brewer at Wind River in Pinedale, Wyoming. A conversation ensued, and Carvajal Erker steered the topic toward cacao pulp.
“I never even knew the pulp existed,” Mosle says. He was curious, so he agreed to experiment with Cocoa Supply’s cacao fruit purée. Back home on Wind River’s 20-barrel system, he drew off 12 gallons of their best-selling Blonde Ale; once it had fermented down to 5°P (1.020), he added 165 ounces of pulp—about 10 percent by volume.
He immediately noted an uptick in fermentation activity, and the fermentation took about three days longer than it would with the base beer—a typical response to adding fruit at this stage. The highly fermentable pulp yielded a slightly lighter finished beer—the cacao version finished at 1.25°P compared to 1.35°P for the base. Notably, the pulp also added some acidity, lowering the beer’s pH to 3.92 from the base’s usual 4.4.
“If I were to use it again, I don’t think I would use it in the Blonde, but I think it would be perfect for a wheat-based beer,” he says; he believes the latter would better accommodate the tartness of the fruit.
At Fifth Street in Dayton, Naghski says he used both freeze-dried pulp and the puree in different iterations of a blonde ale, adding each to separate kegs. The version with the puree tasted slightly sweeter, he says, while the version with the powder turned out drier and brighter. He has since used the puree in their Rough Gem—a farmhouse-inspired ale of 5.5 percent ABV, fermented with saison yeast and Brettanomyces bruxellensis—and he says he liked the resulting flavors. He says he’d also like to try the pulp with Brettanomyces claussenii, in hopes its pineapple and cherry-pie notes would dovetail nicely with the cacao fruit’s tropical notes.
Others have experimented with the pulp in mixed-culture beers, too. At the former Orpheus Brewing in Atlanta, Jason Pellett put raw cacao pulp and seeds sourced via Miami Fruit into a young lambic-inspired beer and allowed them to coferment. The result was a bright, tart, and delicately fruity refresher of 4.5 percent ABV. And at Casa Bruja in Panama City, Panama, Franz Zeimetz put cacao pulp into a mixed-culture farmhouse ale that had been resting in oak for 18 months. He racked the beer to a brite tank and added the pulp for about a month, yielding a balance of funky barnyard notes with the brighter fruit.
“Cacao fruit juice is a pretty delicate flavor,” says Hanna in Hawaii. She says that lighter styles tend to be better fits for the subtle nuances of the fruit. “The essence of it can get lost pretty easily. It’s not something that dominates, like passion fruit.”
On the other hand, she says, the flavors of cacao fruit tend to survive fermentation fairly well in comparison to other delicate fruits, such as lychee. Boiling the juice to concentrate yields deeper notes that she compares to balsamic vinegar—which suggests a possible application in darker styles such as Flemish red ales, if used in moderation.
The Role of Agriculture
While processed cacao-fruit products are available from a handful of sources—including the puree and powder from Cocoa Supply and another freeze-dried option from Miami Fruit—getting whole cacao fruit in the United States is a challenge. Cacao hasn’t been grown with much success in any state except one, and importing it can be difficult and expensive. For those who’d like to experiment on a small scale, Miami Fruit does ship whole pods sourced from Ecuador.
Brewers in Hawaii, meanwhile, have an easier time of working with this esoteric tropical fruit. Cacao is grown commercially on the islands, and there are numerous, small cacao farms and bean-to-bar chocolate makers with whom they could potentially partner. If you do choose to work with whole pods, Hanna says, the pulp is difficult to pull from the seeds; she recommends “washing” the pulp by putting the seeds and mucilage into water and massaging them by hand to separate them. The seeds are then easier to remove.
Because cacao fruit is largely unfamiliar to North Americans, breweries that try it might have to overcome their customers’ fear of the unknown. At Wind River, Mosle says he explained the basics of cacao fruit to his bar staff and encouraged them to pass along the information to curious visitors. At Fifth Street, Naghski says that aside from some pronunciation issues—cacao is pronounced kuh-KOW—most guests were willing to give it a try, and they found that they enjoyed its refreshing, summery flavor.
Naghski says he hopes to experiment further with the pulp in a hazy IPA or pale ale to play off the tropical notes in many hop varieties. He also may try brewing with both cacao pulp and nibs, to tell the complete sensory story of this fruit.
Like beer, chocolate is an agricultural product whose ingredients are largely invisible to consumers. Unlike with wine and coffee, the average fan of beer and chocolate can’t necessarily name what they’re made from. While this lack of awareness can have consequences for both industries, they can be especially dire for cacao, whose farmers and laborers are often underpaid in their home countries.
The opportunity to highlight the fruit directly is one way to not only bring attention to this unique crop, but also to remind drinkers of beer’s own agrarian roots.
“There’s a way to use it to talk about the entire fruit as an agricultural product and not just what is culturally the most popular piece—chocolate,” Naghski says. “There are a lot of breweries out there that find [agricultural] storylines in general important, and this is one more way to do that.”
Brewer’s Perspective
Getting the Most of Cacao, from Fruit to Nibs
Jason Pellett, brewer at De Bekeerde Suster in Amsterdam, explains how he processes cacao fruit for brewing—then keeps it going with the nibs for the next batch of beer ... or homemade chocolate.
As with any clean beer brewed with fruit, there’s a trade-off between the pure character of the raw fruit and the shelf stability of pasteurized fruit. Feel free to use raw cacao fruit if you plan to drink it soon—or if you don’t mind the potential effects of wild yeast and bacteria.
First: If you’d like to later process the seeds into cacao nibs, you can peel off some of the skin—to preserve the microbes for the bacterial fermentation—and freeze it for later use. (More on that below.)
Otherwise, because the fruit’s interior is sterile and the risk of microbes is from the exterior, you can boil the whole fruit for two minutes, leaving the interior relatively cool. Then, as soon as the exterior is cool enough to handle, slice around its equator to cut it in half, and scoop the flesh and seeds out into your sanitized secondary vessel. Purge that vessel with CO2 and rack the beer onto it for maceration—I let it go for two weeks.
Last thought on the fruit itself: I haven’t done this, but you could try roasting some or all the pulp to bring out a range of different flavors.
Making Cacao Nibs
Once your maceration is done, you’ll have cacao seeds that have partially fermented in beer.
After you rack the beer off the fruit, collect the seeds and warm them in an oven to about 100°F (38°C), then mix with the reserved skin and place in a container with a colander or drainage. Keep it warm—with a heating pad, perhaps—mixing the seeds and draining the container at least once per day. The fermentation should take about five days, and the insides of the seeds should turn from white or purple to brown.
Traditionally, the seeds should dry slowly in the sun for five to seven days, but a food dehydrator or warm oven can also work at home—they must be below 140°F (60°C) and ideally closer to 100°F (38°C). Turn the seeds regularly to encourage even drying and even temperature. Drying should take one to three days, depending on the temperature, until the seeds have lost 50 percent of their weight.
Finally, roast the fermented seeds at 248°F (120°C) for 20 to 30 minutes, using their aroma as your guide to when to stop. Remove the husks like you’re peeling garlic, or just crush it all and use a fan to blow away the light husks.
Once they’re crushed to the appropriate size, cacao nibs are ready for your next beer—or you can continue refining them into homemade chocolate.