The cream and malt forge a formidable team that wrests control of your palate and forces you to acquiesce to its deliciousness. You’re rewarded with a solid cocoa bite on the back end that fades into the aftertaste, readying you for the next draw.
Stony Creek Dairy Low Fat Swiss Chocolate Milk
Remarkable confidence to keep sweetness as a tertiary feature, with a strong upfront mature (nigh earthy) cocoa profile, and a lasting creamy tail that pays delicious homage to its origins.
Polka Dot Dairy Lowfat Chocolate Milk
Smooth and sweet, with an average cocoa flavor and intensity. It’s drinkable, enjoyable while it lasts, but forgettable when it’s gone.
Polka Dot Dairy Extra Rich Chocolate Milk
Thick and sweet— but perhaps comes up a bit short of the ‘extra rich’ moniker— as there’s more of a salty-malty snap to it rather than a chocolaty richness. Regardless, it’s enjoyable, particularly for those seeking sugary girth.
Valley View Farms Chocolate Milk Shake
Hefty, and paralyzingly sweet, this concoction is sure to add to your waistline and subtract from your lifetime. The maltiness comes on a bit too strong, but still takes a backseat to the cloying deluge of syrupy sludge that goes from esophagus to pancreas in record time. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Valley View Farms Lowfat Chocolate Milk
Its noticeable density comes with a bit of a flavor pop above what you expect; certainly more enjoyable than the previous version that I’ve had a few years ago.
Nature's Touch Lowfat Chocolate Milk
If ‘bland’ and ‘innocuous’ are two things you seek in a chocolate milk, look no further. It’s recognizable as chocolate milk, and that happens to be its best quality.
Nature's Touch Chocolate Milk
Creamier and marginally more flavorful than its low-fat counterpart, but decidedly does not do whole milk justice. Perhaps the ‘nature’ piece of the Nature’s Touch moniker is the high fructose corn syrup, [regular] corn syrup, corn starch, and water. Corn and water are both ‘natural’— so why not..
Oberweis Dairy Organic Chocolate Milk
A deeper, darker, and of course, creamier experience compared with it’s 2% (non-organic) counterpart— but it lacks a salty punch that would further pop the cocoa and cream. Petty nitpicks aside, it’s an absolutely delicious way to spend a few dollars, a few minutes, and a few hundred calories.
Horizon Organic Lowfat Chocolate Milk (50% more cocoa)
Noticeably more chocolaty with a pleasant back-end grassiness to the cream. A marked improvement over the original Horizon chocolate milk— a step up from the previous blandness whilst keeping sweetness rightfully in the background.
Maple Hill Organic Whole Chocolate Milk
Every bit as delectable as its reduced fat sibling (just a tad girthier), this could very well be the best shelf-stable chocolate milk available. Unapologetically grassy, salty, and buttery (not necessarily in that order)— it delivers loads of indulgence from mouth to brainstem to duodenum— and all points in between.
A2 Milk Reduced Sugar Chocolate Milk
A pleasantly chocolaty and creamy base hampered by a mild stevia presence, more accurately described as a ‘twang’ than a ‘sting’. Sure, it supports the ’33% less sugar’ claim, but the ~9g sugar reduction doesn’t seem to warrant the flavor sacrifice.
Rock House Creamery Chocolate Milk
Each sip is an entire dessert in itself. Gorgeous in presentation, impossibly decadent in cocoa flavor, and sweet enough to rot out your molars. It drinks thinner than you expect, but the indulgence strikes harder than you expect— even after you’ve had multiple ounces. This is an experience I won’t soon forget— it’s hives-inducingly chocolaty, and will scratch that indulgence itch all the way down to the bone.
Sparkman's Cream Valley Chocolate Milk
A mass of deliciously creamy cocoa— so thick you can almost chew it. Its salty kick adds dimension to the cream, punch to the cocoa, and overall finality to the exit— which will be spent in reverence. There’s plenty of heft, but its delicious payoff more than does it justice.
Ocheesee Creamery Chocolate Milk
An absolute dream to imbibe, and you won’t want it to end! Jersey cream forged from each buttery blade of grass they bite, mixed with a raw cocoa that serves as its perfect compliment. This is what chocolate milk is meant to be, and each sip is a reminder of how far some have strayed from the herd— when the solution was there the whole time: grass-fed whole milk, cocoa, and pure cane sugar.
Borden Kid Builder Chocolate Milk
Cloying upfront sweetness, especially for a no sugar added product— where the stevia takes over in the latter half of the sip, steering you into a chemical-esque downward spiral of dread. The texture is less concerning, though it sports an odd lightness, thankfully making it less likely to trigger your gag reflex.
Wainwright Dairy Creamery Chocolate Milk
Deliciously dense, with laser-focus on the cocoa experience, which for me, even after 1,400+ chocolate milks, stands out as uniquely prominent and tasty. The creamy base expertly delivers its punchy flavor evenly across all of your tastebuds, and even finding some that were either long dormant or you didn’t know existed.
Borden Dutch Chocolate Milk
Smooth, silky, and more of a caramel flavor than that of chocolate. I’ve had lots of ‘real’ Dutch chocolate milk (in the Netherlands, of course), and those generally sport a stronger cocoa flavor. Regardless, it drinks easily, and is plenty sweet and creamy to get the job done.
Glenview Farms Lowfat Chocolate Milk
Decently pleasant hot-cocoa-packet flavor in an averagely creamy, mildly chalky base. Sadly, mediocrity rises to the top of the ‘institutional’ market, as this is one of the best chocolate milks I’ve had at a hotel breakfast buffet.
Lowcountry Creamery Chocolate Milk
Buttery and direct— with cream that perfectly compliments the cocoa flavor and amplifies its presence well beyond each swallow. Masterful in its simplicity, delicious in its execution; overall a dream to sip.