Is posh hot chocolate the new flat white?

[Celerity]

The café chain Knoops — speciality: sweet milky cocoa drinks — is about to expand across Britain. Surely real men drink coffee? No, says Simon Mills. Plus: Tony Turnbull and Hilary Rose have their say

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/is-posh-hot-chocolate-the-new-flat-white-3bml8x9q5

https://archive.ph/adiPZ



Adults drink coffee. Real coffee from a cafetière or a stove-top Bialetti. Or order it to their bespoke liking from a chain café or a hipster place where a man with a beard and sailor tattoos will take ages to make it and charge you almost five quid for the pleasure. This is now a globally accepted, sociopolitical beverage culture. Caffeine is the only hot drink choice of the busy and stressed-out, careerist metropolitan and impatient sophisticate. It is tetchy and self-centred and I-can’t-do-anything-till-I’ve-had-my-cortado. Don’t-even-talk-to-me-before-my-first-pea-milk-latte. In fact I’m so busy, I have to drink it while I’m walking, driving, dashing for the train — from a plastic, infantilising sippy cup arrangement that makes me look like a big baby. Always “to go”, coffee lasts for just one or two hot minutes, costs more per mouthful than a half-decent off-licence wine and makes you jittery and nervy.

Hot chocolate is a more indulgent beverage. You sit with it. Cup your hands around it. Wallow in its heat and sweetness. Hot chocolate’s cocoa content has benefits too — it contains theobromine, a mild stimulant that releases serotonin and endorphins, encouraging happiness and pleasure, instantly lifting mood and spirit. It won’t have you jonesing like coffee does. Its colour and texture make a nice Instagram picture, its soporific milkiness will tempt you with an afternoon nap. It is the choice of the decadent unemployable and the free-posting influencer. And now, just like coffee before it, hot chocolate is about to get commercially caffeinated too.

With its eye on becoming hot chocolate’s equivalent of Starbucks, the British brand Knoops, currently with 17 shops in the UK, has plans for 40 … and then 300. Having secured partners in the Middle East and pending discussions in America and China, the chain aims to hit its target of 3,000 shops globally by 2030. “We’re a category killer,” says William Gordon-Harris, the Knoops chief executive, who discovered the brand in Rye, East Sussex, four years ago when it was run by its German founder, Jens Knoop. “We have no competitors in the world that do what we do and I think that with the right ambition, combined with the right systems and people, I don’t believe there’s any way we can’t build a billion-dollar brand here.” (Knoop, by the way, is the German for “Button” — chocolate button!)



Go to Knoops on Kensington High Street or Chelsea and you’ll find a carefully curated menu of hot and cold chocolate drinks with more than 20 strengths and styles of cacao. Choices range from 70 per cent single-origin Congo variety with notes of cherries and black tea and a subtle earthiness to 49 per cent single-origin Venezuelan with notes of molasses, pecan and coffee. Expect fruit and nuts prices too — £6.95 for a regular cup — and big queues. This overgrown Milky Bar kid is already a Knoops convert, having made regular lockdown trips to my local branch with my two daughters in 2021. During those cold evenings, quiet lines formed to get a hot hit of dark pleasure during an even darker time. On pretty much every visit I was the only man in the (socially distanced) shop. I was easily the oldest person too.

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