Our Process
What is Bean-to-Bar Chocolate?
Artisanal. Craft. Bean-to-bar. So many labels, it’s easy to be confused. While the first two have broad meanings, “bean-to-bar” refers to the art of making chocolate from whole cacao beans through a long process that can include roasting, refining, molding and aging. Rather than melting down already-made chocolate to turn into confections, bean-to-bar makers start with cacao that’s been carefully selected for flavor quality and then transform that cacao into chocolate. Read below for a quick primer on how we make our award-winning bean-to-bar chocolate.
Once we receive the raw cacao, we hand-sort the beans, removing any inferior or broken ones.After dozens of test roasts, we settle on a roasting profile that will best highlight the unique qualities of the cacao from a certain origin. Light roasts highlight fruity and floral qualities while darker roasts bring out nuttier, spicier notes.
After roasting, we crack the beans into pieces called cacao nibs and separate the husks from the nibs so that only the nibs get turned into chocolate.The nibs will grind non-stop in our stone grinders for several days, allowing the texture to become smoother and the flavor of the chocolate to continue developing until it hits the profile we are searching for. Only organic cane sugar is added to our nibs for our single origin bars and other flavor ingredients for our flavor-inclusion bars.
Once the liquid chocolate is perfect, we transfer the chocolate into our tempering machine and mold the chocolate into solid bars. All of our bars are lovingly hand-wrapped in locally designed and locally printed wrappers made of sustainably produced paper with a luxury feel--ready for instant gifting.
We’re proud to have won multiple awards for our chocolate from both US and international award organizations and we’re always working to improve our processes and recipes so that we’re only creating the very best.
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