Chocolate You Drink: How Indian Craft Makers Are Rethinking the Cup

Cacao is everywhere inside Manam Chocolate Karkhana in Banjara Hills, Hyderabad: in the air, on the shelves, behind the glass. The newest addition to the space, though, is not something you unwrap. It is something you sip.

Twenty-six beverages now line the menu at Manam's new Chocolate Beverage Bar, and not one of them resembles the powdered cocoa drink of childhood memory. This is craft chocolate in liquid form: shaken, stirred, layered, frothed, and foamed using techniques borrowed from mixology. The question it raises is one that matters far beyond Hyderabad: what happens when artisan chocolate makers start thinking like specialty coffee roasters?

The Parallel Is Closer Than It Looks

Specialty coffee has spent years moving beyond the bean. Roasters run espresso bars, cold brew programmes, and tasting flights; the product is no longer just a bag of beans but an experience built around customisation, education, and ritual. Craft chocolate has been slower to follow, though not everywhere. Flow Cacao, in Sofia, works with single-origin Latin American cacao in ceremonial formats that honour the bean's origin and complexity, moving far beyond the chocolate bar as the only endpoint.

Manam's beverage bar follows the same logic. Ruby Islam, Head of Product and Innovation at Manam Chocolate, puts it plainly in an interview with Deccan Chronicle:

Chocolate is not just a bar.

Ruby Islam

The brand has already explored pastries, gelatos, bonbons, and truffles. The beverage bar is another extension of that thinking: chocolate as a craft ingredient that can be experienced across multiple formats, not a single product category.

Customisation Rooted in Education

The bar is open, not hidden. Guests watch the chocolate beverage baristas at work, ask questions, and engage with the process while their drinks are made. This is the same transparency that defines specialty coffee culture: the ritual of watching espresso pulled, milk steamed, latte art poured.

But the customisation goes deeper. Customers choose their couverture first, ranging from creamy white chocolate to 100 per cent dark, and taste it before deciding what goes into their drink. Then comes the temperature, the milk type (dairy, almond, oat, or coconut), and the additional flavours.

The pairings are unexpected:

• Guntur chilli with dark chocolate
• Matcha with white chocolate
• Banana with chocolate
• Berries
• A blueberry oat iced chocolate

The combinations are rooted in ingredients that have an association with cacao and its origins: spices, fruits, flowers, and herbs that grow near cacao-producing regions.

The sweetness comes from the chocolate itself.

What This Signals for Craft Chocolate Culture

The beverage bar is not a gimmick. It is a format shift that mirrors what specialty coffee went through a decade ago: the realisation that a single product (the bean, the bar) is only the beginning. The real craft lies in how that ingredient is experienced across temperature, texture, and ritual.

Bean-to-bar makers who stop at the bar are leaving half the story untold. The same precision that goes into sourcing, roasting, and tempering can extend into how chocolate is served, customised, and shared.

Manam's menu is built around the chocolate itself, not around sweeteners, syrups, or shortcuts. That is the difference between a craft beverage programme and a dessert menu. The customer learns something while drinking. The experience is educational, not just indulgent.

The Format Is the Message

What Manam has done in Hyderabad is take a craft ingredient and ask how many ways it can be experienced without losing its integrity. The answer, it turns out, is more than most of us imagined.

At one end of Manam's menu sits the 100 per cent dark version, a cup with no sweetness in it at all. There is nothing to hide behind in a drink like that: only the cacao, and what Manam did with it before it reached the cup.