Best sauce/liquid mocha, white mocha, caramel, and chai?

[Daniel James Scriver]

We'd like to have our mocha, white mocha, caramel, and chai in liquid/sauce form for making drinks. This is especially important for blended and iced, but nice for hot drinks too.

What companies make good ones?

Any companies sell these in powder form where you add hot water and mix in store to make your bulk sauce? A couple big chain coffee chains I've worked for have this and it worked great.

Thanks,

[Jay Caragay]

Instead of buying mixes, why not take the time to develop your own sauces? I think a lot of people in the coffee business forget that a lot of the stuff we mix in with coffee isn't normally a powdered mix. You can easily (and affordably) make your own chocolate sauce, white chocolate sauce, syrups, caramel and chai without having to resort to a mix or powder from a commercial company.

[Denise Smith]

Why not do it all from scratch... TIME!

Jay Caragay said:

Instead of buying mixes, why not take the time to develop your own sauces? I think a lot of people in the coffee business forget that a lot of the stuff we mix in with coffee isn't normally a powdered mix. You can easily (and affordably) make your own chocolate sauce, white chocolate sauce, syrups, caramel and chai without having to resort to a mix or powder from a commercial company.

[Ricky Sutton]

I feel that Guittard is some of the better stuff as far as cheap and commercially available sauces go. Or chocolate, white chocolate and caramel are Guittard and they're all decent. If you want something mind blowing, you will have to make it yourself. Our chai is Oregon Chai, but i'm not particularly fond of it. Dragonfly has a wide variety of tastier chai concentrates.

[Gwen]

I can't really answer anything about the syrups. But at my company we use a Chai concentrate made from actual tea and sweetened vanilla. It works wonderfully and makes great hot and cold drinks with out all the extra junk you would get in a syrup or those icky Oregon Chai boxes. You can get bulk tea over the internet and brew it up in gallon, or larger, batches depending on your needs. Sweetening is important. I imagine you could use a vanilla beverage syrup like Dolce or whatever flavor you like. Simple syrup is also easy to make and adds no additional flavor. We generally sweeten our entire batches but, I'm trying to move to a per cup sweetening so that we can accommodate customers with special needs for sugar free or low-sugar drinks. I would recommend looking into it at least to see if it's a feasible option for your company.

[Bryan Wray]

We buy the Guittard cocoa mix in 50lb barrels and then mix in our own vanilla and sweeteners.

We make our own cocoa for hot chocolates. A simple starting point is to find a cocoa you like and 3 parts sugar and a little salt. To make a 15lb batch takes about 4 minutes. Then when you go to make it just scoop some of the powder in, add a little hot water (or milk) and stir to break it down into a liquid and then just go from there.

It really takes no time to make it yourself and it's a poor excuse to skip over quality.

I've found that my favorite chai mix is Tipu's Tiger. It's got a nice spicy kick to it, but chai isn't hard to make yourself either. A simple google search of chai concentrate recipes will turn up thousands of results.

-bry

[Bryan Wray]

As a side note, anyone else find the Guittard pumps absolutely useless? They're nearly impossible to use and they don't measure evenly. Maybe it's just our shop, but all of the baristas I work with hate the things and think they work horibbly/not at all.

-bry

Bryan Wray said:

We buy the Guittard cocoa mix in 50lb barrels and then mix in our own vanilla and sweeteners.

We make our own cocoa for hot chocolates. A simple starting point is to find a cocoa you like and 3 parts sugar and a little salt. To make a 15lb batch takes about 4 minutes. Then when you go to make it just scoop some of the powder in, add a little hot water (or milk) and stir to break it down into a liquid and then just go from there.

It really takes no time to make it yourself and it's a poor excuse to skip over quality.

I've found that my favorite chai mix is Tipu's Tiger. It's got a nice spicy kick to it, but chai isn't hard to make yourself either. A simple google search of chai concentrate recipes will turn up thousands of results.

-bry

[Jay Caragay]

I challenge anyone who claims they don't have "time" to make their own sauces as being lazy.

Without a doubt making something worthwhile, such as handmade sauces, takes time. But to state that baristas don't have enough time to make the sauce is ridiculous. I'm sure there are several times throughout the day that the barista has time on his/her hands when service slows.

What you're talking about is lack of commitment not lack of time.


Denise Smith said:

Why not do it all from scratch... TIME!

[Bryan Wray]

Amen broth'a!
-bry

Jay Caragay said:

I challenge anyone who claims they don't have "time" to make their own sauces as being lazy.

Without a doubt making something worthwhile, such as handmade sauces, takes time. But to state that baristas don't have enough time to make the sauce is ridiculous. I'm sure there are several times throughout the day that the barista has time on his/her hands when service slows.

What you're talking about is lack of commitment not lack of time.


Denise Smith said:

Why not do it all from scratch... TIME!