Kiva’s cannabis chocolate espresso beans are great. A consistent, tasty product with a strong brand and distribution make them perhaps one of the most recognizable and best-selling edible in California. However, Kiva shouldn’t get too complacent as there’s a newcomer on the market that’s taking things to the next level. The good folks at Somatik recently launched Sparks, a craft take of the cannabis chocolate espresso bean, and it’s good. Very good.
Making Better Cannabis Chocolate Espresso Beans
Somatik is best known for their cannabis cold brew. Made in collaboration with San Francisco’s Ritual Coffee, the brew is made from single-origin Colombian beans and then infused with THC. Given their expertise in both coffee and cannabis making cannabis chocolate espresso beans seemed like a no-brainer. So they teamed up again with Ritual and brought in Berkeley-based chocolate maker, Endorfin Foods, to do Kiva one better by using high-quality, responsibly-sourced dark chocolate.
Kiva’s version uses a milk chocolate of unspecified origin sourced from a “Belgian chocolate maker” according to those we spoke to. Sparks, by contrast are made with craft dark chocolate, which means they are lower in sugar and sourced-responsibly by Endorfin. To those used to the Kiva’s cannabis chocolate espresso beans, Sparks may seem intense. They are not as sweet and certainly more bitter, as high-cacao, dark chocolate tends to be. We felt this worked well, though, by complementing the bitterness of the coffee bean for a more balanced flavor. Each little Spark contain 3mg of THC, but we found them to feel a bit more like 5mg. Could be just us and not a bad thing, just something to note.
The Next Level
Chris and Clayton, Somatik’s founders, are clearly passionate about the collision of cannabis and coffee. They continue to produce and experiment to bring their customers the best cannabis edibles. Depending on how the economics of the new regulations shake out, they are playing with the idea of dialing up the ‘craft’ in their products by pairing different coffees with particular terpene profiles of certain strains. Pairing terpenes with coffee flavor notes is next level and WE CAN’T WAIT for it.