What is a mocha?

Everything you need to know about the coffee synonymous with the perfect balance of chocolate, espresso, and milk

TL;DR The mocha is a regular-sized coffee that typically contains a double shot of espresso, mixed with chocolate, with latte-style milk integrated into it, making an incredibly smooth, chocolatey drink.

What is it?

Ahh, the mocha, perhaps one of the most luxurious drinks out there. The perfect balance of chocolate, espresso, and milk, the mocha at its core is incredibly similar to a latte, but with a chocolatey touch.

In the Forest of Dean, it’s a highly popular drink and is often combined with oat milk to create an incredibly smooth and slightly sweet drink with a hint of bitterness to it provided by some fantastically luscious chocolate pieces.

There are numerous ways to create a mocha; at Hips, it’s important to us that we carefully integrate all the ingredients in the correct order. Typically, we add one tablespoon of chocolate flakes into our chocolate/mocha shaker, then add a double shot of our house espresso on top of that. This is then shaken together, melting and combining the two into a sumptuous syrup ready for the next stage. Once our syrup is ready, it’s then poured into one of our blue cups, ready for the freshly steamed milk to be added on top.

What you end up with is a beautifully chocolatey beverage. Fun fact: thanks to the espresso and chocolate working together, the Mocha is one of the easiest drinks to pour complex latte art into, as the chocolate helps accentuate the bold lines in the milk.

The Coffee

All of our coffees at Hips are built around our top-quality espresso. It doesn’t matter what coffee you’re drinking; at its core, it’s the espresso that will make or break it. At Hips, we use a bespoke blend of Ethiopian and Brazilian coffee beans, roasted to perfection by our friends over at Studio Coffee Roasters in Hereford. 

We typically use a medium-roast coffee for our house espresso, as it ensures you retain the unique characteristics and flavors of our coffee bean’s natural environments without compromising on the intensity and taste you’d find from a darker roast.

18g of ground coffee goes in, 36g of espresso comes out (Image Credit: Hips Social)

The longer you roast coffee beans, the darker they become, and the more bitter and brittle the result. This is fine if you like a really strong, bitter coffee, but it does take away some of the fruity and sharp taste characteristics you’d find in the beans otherwise.

As for our espresso recipe, we use 18 g of ground coffee per double shot of espresso. This is freshly ground for every shot thanks to our Victoria Arduino Mythos One coffee grinders. Once ground, this is added to our portafilter handles from our Faema E71 espresso machine, carefully distributed and then tamped evenly with 40 kg of force to extract any air pockets before being put through the machine.

Once locked in position, in the case of the mocha, a shot cup is placed underneath, and our espresso bar will then push water through the coffee puck at 92° C with nine bars of pressure to let loose all of that beautiful flavor and caffeine we know and love. Each shot of espresso we pull should leave us with 36 g of liquid at the end and run for around 30 seconds or so, including a three-second pre-infusion.

We also offer a guest coffee (dialed in and ground to the same high standards) as well, that changes month-on-month, alongside a beautifully sophisticated (and slightly chocolatey in of itself) decaf Columbian roast, carefully crafted by Studio Coffee Roasters as well.

The Milk

All of our drinks can of course be customized to your preference, whether you prefer oat, coconut, skimmed, or whole milk. If unspecified, however, our team of baristas will typically use whole milk for the mocha as standard. Thanks to the mixtures of fats and proteins in whole milk, when combined and heated with steam, it creates an incredibly complex and smooth milk, perfect for pouring into drinks like the mocha, cappuccino, latte, and flat white.

When steaming milk for a mocha, our team of baristas will typically steam it in a similar manner to that of a flat white or latte. Ideally looking for 2-3 seconds of air incorporation to create a small layer of micro-foam on top of the milk rather than a thicker foam layer, like you’d expect with a cappuccino or something similar.

Steaming milk correctly is a fine art, balancing air, temperature and technique to create silky smooth texture (image credit: Hips Social)

Once completely steamed to the correct temperature (around 65° C), this is then added to our chocolatey espresso syrup. The wet or milk barista will slowly integrate the milk into the cup in a circular pattern, typically at an angle. Once the cup is half way to two thirds full, they’ll then shift the lip of the milk jug closer to the surface to add more foam to the drink and start creating the latte art that will sit on top.

Similar to the latte, as there’s a lot more milk added to the drink unlike a cappuccino, this does pull some of that bitterness away from the espresso and chocolate flakes, as the molecules in the milk bind to the bitter ones in the coffee itself.

Custom Mochas

Tired of the standard mocha? Want to experiment a little? You can always customize your mocha how you like. Syrups are a great way of adding a little variety to the mocha, particularly caramel, hazelnut, and pumpkin spice in the cooler months.

Alternatively, try it with a different type of milk; coconut milk mochas are a fantastic mix if you’re interested in something that tastes a little more tropical. Additionally, oat milk, with its natural sweetness, gives the mocha a slightly sweeter feel without adding extra sugar to the mix.

Our team’s fave at Hips? Iced vanilla mocha, it’s just perfect for a slightly toasty shift behind the bar on a warm summer’s day.

The Origins of the Mocha

Interestingly, the drink and the name that it now has have very different origins. The name comes from the port city of Mokha, in Yemen. One of the critical coffee trade ports from the early 15th century, Mokha was well renowned for its imports and trade of our favorite caffeinated bean. Coffee itself, although originating in Ethiopia, was first widely used in the Arabian Peninsula and only made it to Europe in the later 16th and 17th centuries.

The term mocha, however, initially referred to coffee transiting through the port of Mokha itself or grown in the surrounding area rather than as the chocolatey coffee drink we know it as today. Reports of coffee first being mixed with chocolate actually only occur during the 1600s in Italy, notably Northern Italy, in the city of Turin. It was only in the middle of the 1900s that the drink and its name finally came together, with the rise of the coffee bar across Italy and Europe.