On 01 October 2019, the Yuengling brewery in Pennsylvania announced that it was using Hershey’s chocolate to create a limited edition Hershey’s Chocolate Porter beer.
The concept of drinking chocolate instead of eating it dates back to the first people to consume chocolate.
“It’s unclear exactly when cacao came on the scene or who invented it. According to Hayes Lavis, cultural arts curator for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, ancient Olmec pots and vessels from around 1500 B.C. were discovered with traces of theobromine, a stimulant compound found in chocolate and tea.
It’s thought the Olmecs used cacao to create a ceremonial drink. However, since they kept no written history, opinions differ on if they used cacao beans in their concoctions or just the pulp of the cacao pod.
The Olmecs undoubtedly passed their cacao knowledge on to the Central American Mayans who not only consumed chocolate, they revered it. The Mayan written history mentions chocolate drinks being used in celebrations and to finalize important transactions.”
Here is more from the Smithsonian Magazine article A Brief History of Chocolate in the United States.
The pulp of the cacao fruit was used by the Olmec people to make an alcoholic drink, according to researchers who examined pottery excavated from a site in Puerto Escondido, Honduras. “This development probably provided the impetus to domesticate the chocolate tree and only later, to prepare a beverage based on the more bitter beans,” one of the study’s authors said in a Penn Museum press release. “An alcoholic beverage from the pulp, carrying on this ancient tradition, continues to be made in parts of Latin America.”
Chocolate as a beverage was popular in the American colonies, as Rodney Snyder reveals in History of Chocolate: Chocolate in the American Colonies.
The idea of James Bond wanting his chocolate shaken, not stirred, is not far fetched. Dilettante Chocolates in Seattle sells a chocolate martini.
By the way, if you want to know just how chocolate goes from being a part of a plant to being a tasty treat, then read the HuffPost article “How Cocoa Beans Grow And Are Harvested Into Chocolate” by Julie R. Thomson.
Featured Image shows two cocoa beans.
Featured Image by Mikkel Houmøller, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
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