It was the best of times, it was the thirst of times, back in the pre-COVID days of September 2019, here in America at least. Alcohol brands were in a fever pitch to cram coffee and/or cold brew into any product they could. PBR, Jameson, Baileys, that one weird wine, they all had some coffee-flavored variant, though some inexplicably non-alcoholic. And Jägermeister, a German digestif with a global following, was hopping on the bandwagon with their own cold brew-infused “herbal liqueur.”
But time is a flat circle eating its own tail or some such recursive hoopla, because Jager how now teamed up with Chicago’s Dark Matter to release a whole bean coffee infused with coffee-infused Jager, alongside a chocolate bar version of said collaborative flavor explosion.
Dark Matter is certainly not new to the barrel-aging game. The Chicago roaster has been offering barrel-conditioned coffees for years and at this moment has both roasted coffee and cold brew cans of the stuff, so they are an obvious choice to put this particular hat atop the other hat. Per Dark Matter’s website, the coffee—a honey-processed Caturra variety from San Jeronimo Mirmar in Guatemala—is “conditioned with Jägermeister Cold Brew Coffee Liqueur, infusing the beans with the flavor profile of this fruity, botanical liqueur,” giving it notes of concord grape, cocoa nib, and black licorice. For the chocolate counterpart, a Trinitario variety cacao from Chiapas, Mexico gets the same conditioning before being turned into a bar that tastes of grape jam, citrus peel, and black cherry.
You can get your hands on 12oz bags of Jager Cold Brew-conditioned Dark Matter Coffee as well as the Jager Cold Brew chocolate bars starting February 4th at any Dark Matter cafe in Chicago or via their website.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
