Cacao beans grow in pods on the trunks of the theobromo cacao tree in tropical climates.
Fine flavor beans make up a tiny percentage of cacao produced worldwide. These "fine flavor" beans command the highest prices paid at market. Cookies, brownies, cakes, hot cocoa - none of these use fine flavor cacao. All fine chocolates start with fine flavor beans.
Raised for the quality, these cacao trees produce less, are more fragile, and require more attention from the farmer. It is a great advantage to the small farmer to raise fine flavor cacao and be better compensated.
Great care must be taken raising these trees and it doesn't end there. The harvesting, fermenting, drying and storage must be handled properly to produced a bean with fine flavor.
Many of the quality chocolate companies send their own people to the farms to help educate the farmers about how to handle the beans to maximize flavor. Always choose fine chocolate.
The pods are harvested when they reach a rich, orange color. Cut open, the beans and white pulp are set aside to ferment.
As the pulp ferments, it runs off the beans, leaving them to be harvested.
Once free of the pulp, the beans are further fermented and dried. When ready, they are packed in canvas bags and shipped to fincaChocolate.
At fincaChocolate, the beans are sorted by size, slow roasted, cracked and separated from the shells.
Why small batch roasting? If beans are roasted without sorting, some will be under roasted and others burned. We sort by hand, for size. Every batch.
Pictured is the separated and coursely ground beans, ready to be made into liquor.
Many artisan chocolates are not bean to bar. They start with bulk liquor to make their finished product.
The chocolate process begins by grounding the cacao into paste, called chocolate liquor.
The next steps start to separate the ordinary from the extraordinary.
FincaChocolate adds pure cane sugar and uses a melanger to grind the ingredients to craft our smoothest, premium texture.
The final process is to temper the chocolate to keep all the elements in perfect balance, creating long strings of molectular crystals. Once tempered, the chocolate is poured into molds.
The final product, from bean to bar! Bean to bar is a term used to describe chocolate produced from raw beans to finished bars.
Our packaging? Our chocolate is beautiful, not our wrapper. The aluminum foil is reusable and recyclable. It protects the chocolate from losing its flavor. The brown craft paper is simple and recyclable.
