Coffee, pastry, chocolate: oak outside the cellar

Roasters, pastry chefs and chocolate makers write to us. We are happy to answer, and we point out every time that our measurements were made in wine.

We have no market figures to give you on these uses, and we do not claim to have watched them appear. What we do see are requests that have been coming in regularly for a few years now, from trades that do not usually call a cooperage. Enough to write this article, not enough to present ourselves as specialists in coffee roasting or chocolate making.

What can wood do outside a tank?

Toasted oak carries vanillin, lactones, toasted compounds and sugars that come from the breakdown of the wood. For them to move into a product, you need a solvent and time. Alcohol extracts more of them and faster; water, acids and sugars extract some of them, more slowly and not in the same proportions. That is what we have checked on non-alcoholic drinks, at a qualitative level.

On fats, cocoa butter or cream, we have no measurements at all. Extraction into a fat probably does not behave like extraction into a water phase, but we have nothing to put numbers on it, and we will not do so from our curves on wine.

Coffee and cold brew

This is the use we hear about most. Green coffee beans rested on oak chips, or a cold brew infusion run in contact with the wood. The long infusion time of cold brew works in your favor: extraction from the wood is gentle, and the vanilla or toasted notes settle in without crushing the origin of the coffee.

We have no publishable extraction curve for a cold-brewed coffee, and the risk we keep seeing in the feedback is always the same: the wood ends up in front of the product. Low dose, daily tasting, an untreated control alongside.

Creams, syrups and pastry

A cream, a syrup or a custard infused with oak behaves like a classic infusion: the wood goes in hot, then is removed or filtered out. The vanilla and smoky notes pair well with chocolate, fruit and caramelized preparations, which is not very surprising since they are partly the same families of compounds.

There is a loop worth mentioning here, and it amuses us: our convection oven comes from a bakery. Back in the 90s, watching a baker pull out croissants baked the same way at the top and at the bottom of the rack, we understood where to look to solve our problem with even heating. The know-how came from pastry; that it would come back to it through wood was not part of the plan.

Chocolate

Some chocolate makers rest cacao nibs on oak chips and describe a more complex profile. You sometimes read that oak tannins react with cocoa polyphenols to form new aromatic compounds. It is a plausible hypothesis, we have not measured it, and so we will not present it as a fact.

The figures we do have

Unless stated otherwise, these values come from our technical sheets and our own measurements, and they were established in wine.

None of these values was established on a coffee, a cream or a chocolate. They give you the order of magnitude of a product, not the duration of your trial.

The regulatory question, not one to skip

The Oenological Codex governs our chips for use in wine. It says nothing about coffee roasting or chocolate making. If your production falls under general food regulations, it is up to you to check what applies to contact with wood, and we will send you the documents we have on our products.

Where to start

On a batch you are willing to lose, with the smallest pack size in the oak shop, and an untreated control. The most common questions are gathered in our questions and answers. We keep learning about these uses, largely thanks to what craftspeople tell us. If one of our figures does not hold up in your shop, write to us: we would rather correct it than defend it.

Read next : Oak in a Non-Alcoholic Drink: What We Have Seen So Far · Oak in beer: our benchmarks come from wine