Hotel Chocolat The Velvetiser

Verdict

The Hotel Chocolat The Velvetiser is a fantastic appliance for making rich luxurious hot chocolate and adding more froth to your morning coffee. It’s stylish and substantial while also being easy to use and impressive with its decadent results in both hot chocolate and coffee. If you want to grab a brilliant modern milk frother, this is a marvellous choice.

Introduction

Hotel Chocolat’s The Velvetiser is a very simple product, promising to offer velvety smooth and luxurious hot chocolate in a matter of moments.

If an appliance has only one use case, like the humble Velvetiser, then it needs to be especially good at that one process for it to be worth a recommendation, especially when it costs £99.95/$100. For that money, you can purchase some excellent kettles such as the Ninja Perfect Temperature Kettle KT200UK the Dualit Pour Over Kettle, or even more affordable Nespresso coffee machines.

However, the Velvetiser offers an interesting proposition amongst its contemporaries given it’s a trend-setting product which a lot of other brands have since copied, so it comes with high expectations. I’ve been testing it for the last few weeks to see how well it performs.

Design and Features

• Stylish, sturdy finish
• Very easy to operate
• Fuss-free maintenance

The Velvetiser comes in three colours, available in white, copper, or the grey charcoal variant I’ve got here. It’s a jug-style milk frother, complete with a protruding handle for easy pouring that offers its own textured, high-quality finish. As much as this may be a simple appliance in terms of its feature set, it’s one of the more stylish choices out there which also feels excellent in-hand.

Everything about the Velvetiser feels substantial, even if its construction is plastic. The whisk is also plastic, but feels well-made. Being engineered in partnership with Dualit offers its benefits, and the Velvetiser’s durable finish is seemingly one of them.

Physical touches are otherwise minimalistic with a small Hotel Chocolat logo at the base, as well as a translucent lid and a large illuminated button for turning the Velvetiser on. The button’s illumination is also an indicator for when the Velvetiser has finished working – it’s illuminated when it starts and turns off once the cycle is finished.

Inside, the Velvetiser features small fill line guides that mark how much liquid needs to be added, up to a maximum of 220ml, while the plastic whisk attachment for frothing action magnetically attaches to the base. That’s a handy touch for ensuring it always stays in place, while also making its maintenance fuss-free.

It sits on a base in a similar way to a kettle, which also is where the Velvetiser plugs into the mains. Using it is also easy – simply add in a sachet of chocolate, your preferred amount of fluid, put the lid on and press the button. Once the button is no longer illuminated, take the Velvetiser off its base and pour it into a glass. That’s it – no settings to mess around with or extra work needed.

The whisk magnetically detaches from the base for easy cleaning, and the inside of the Velvetiser offers a metal, non-stick coating that is easy to wash out, in the same way a mug or saucepan is.

Performance

• Velvety smooth results in coffee and hot chocolate
• Reasonably speedy boil time
• First-party hot chocolate can be expensive

In my time with the Velvetiser, I tried it with different types of hot chocolate and milk, and used it both for making hot chocolate and to supplement existing appliances, such as my Nespresso coffee machine, for a frothier experience. Across the board, it impressed with rich and velvety results.

For my first test, I tried a more standard option with one of Hotel Chocolat’s own recommended Caffe Latte sachets with whole milk. I used one sachet and the recommended 220ml of milk, and the Velvetiser took two and a half minutes to muster up a frothy coffee. The result was rich with a thick consistency and excellent flavour.

Moving over to another recommended Hotel Chocolat flavour, I tried an iced chocolate, using a 70% Classic sachet and semi-skimmed milk. With this, I poured 100ml of milk into a glass with ice and left that to chill. I then poured a sachet into the Velvetiser, and a further 120ml of milk. It velvetised in the same time, and worked fantastically well, offering a thick consistency akin to chocolate milk.

As much as Hotel Chocolat recommends that you use its own flakes in the Velvetiser, I wanted to try a third-party choice to see how different it was. For this test, I stuck with semi-skimmed milk but opted for a Whittard Sticky Toffee Pudding hot chocolate. As much as this isn’t a recommended option, the Velvetiser worked a treat with it – Whittard’s chocolate tends to be rich anyway, but frothing it with the Velvetiser added another layer to its decadent flavour.

Hotel Chocolat also recommends using the Velvetiser simply as a milk frother for supplementing espresso to create a thick, frothy latte. I tried this in conjunction with the Hotel Chocolat Podster coffee machine, which has since been discontinued, but is a Nespresso-compatible coffee machine that’s easy to use. With this, I tried Hotel Chocolat’s own Rabot Estate coffee pods paired with soya milk, using both the Cashmere and The One pods for my testing.

Putting through two pods to create a double-shot espresso of sorts worked well for offering a stronger coffee flavour, while velvetising the soya milk was easy. It also frothed well and added a lot of flavour to the coffee.

For a final test, I moved over to trying a Starbucks Caramel Nespresso pod, which was also put through twice, but used coconut milk instead. The coconut milk worked an absolute charm, velvetising well and adding a certain creamines and sweetness to my morning coffee.

If you’re doing things the recommended way, the only point of contention here is the higher costs of Hotel Chocolat’s own sachets of chocolate, which cost £13.50 for 10 sachets. They’re the same price whether you opt for standard chocolate options such as Mint or Orange, or special ones such as Burnt Pineapple (which is fantastic), or the coffee sachets too. Third-party chocolate options can work well however, and will be cheaper.

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