My wife drinks a lot of coffee, so we got a Keurig for Christmas last year.  I don’t drink straight-up coffee at all.  The only coffee beverage I ever indulge in is the occasional French vanilla cappuccino.   So even though I find owning a Keurig to be unnecessarily expensive (I know, I know, it’s all about the convenience), I still get excited to overpay for products every once in a while just to enjoy stuff that I like.

The latest such product are Choceur Dark Chocolate Hot Chocolate K Cups.  I was actually researching hot chocolate K cups a long time ago, when we first got the machine, and saw that, at least based on reviews, there were really no good options.  This is because all of them used an artificial sweetener, sucralose, on top of sugar, which gave them all a terrible artificial taste (I tried one brand and can definitely verify how terrible it was).  One possible explanation that was given was that there really wasn’t enough room inside the K cup for an adequate amount of sugar to make it taste like legitimate hot chocolate (it sounds good, though I don’t know the plausibility of such a statement).

Choceur’s version is more or less the same, with a mix of real sugar, and fake sucralose, but this is by far the best K cup hot chocolate I’ve had.  The chocolate is rich and tasty, at least, as rich as hot chocolate made out of water can be, and while you can still taste the artificial sweeteners, the chocolate is strong enough that it becomes more of the focal point.  Note that this review pertains to a medium-sized cup…I’m sure if you were to “brew” this into a large cup, it would taste like little more than hot water with a hint of cocoa.

I certainly have a major complaint, so let me rant on for a bit here.  It probably has more to do with the Keurig explosion in general than it does this specific product, but I’m going to vent anyway.  First, is the price.  For 12 of these hot chocolate K cups, it’s $5.  Forty-two cents per serving.  Sadly, this is considered a great deal in the world of K cups, where convenience more or less trumps logic.  But I could (and still will) buy 12 packets of hot chocolate mix, use milk instead of water, and get a much creamier and more satisfying end product for $2 (plus the cost of milk, which still works out to less than $5).  I know, I know, it’s much easier to push a button and forget about it, and that’s what Keurig’s are all about, but it’s not that much harder to rip open a packet, dump it in milk, and stir.

Overall: 6/10.  This review opened me up to a quandary of sorts:  On the one hand, it’s the best hot chocolate K cup I’ve had, and it’s also fairly inexpensive as far as these are concerned.  Yet better hot chocolate can be had for even cheaper using packets of hot cocoa mix, and milk, something the Keurig cannot handle.  So I’m recommending it solely for what it is:  A matter of convenience, which is entirely what those machines stand for.  If you’re a die-hard Keurig user, you can do far worse from giving these a whirl.  As for me, I prefer sticking to the old-fashioned method.