The vanilla bean provides a sweet, yet somewhat smokey taste. It does depend on the kind of vanilla used. It originally comes from Mexico, where even then it was used as a way to enhance chocolate beverages by the Aztecs. Now vanilla beans are grown everywhere and the plant does take some taste from the soil it grows from. Vanilla is an expensive botanical, so some may use a vanilla extract, or artificial vanilla, which doesn’t have as much of the woody, smoky flavor and instead is sweeter.