What is bean to bar chocolate?

Most chocolate found in supermarkets, and even in many high-end chocolate shops, is mass produced by a small number of multinational companies on behalf of other brands. Making chocolate, flavour and quality are not always the priority, with low cost often driving production decisions.

Bean to bar craft chocolate is made on a much smaller scale using higher quality cacao, fewer added ingredients, along with far greater attention to detail. Every stage of the process is handled in house, from importing cacao to sorting, roasting and grinding, to tempering, wrapping and, in our case, designing and stitching. Much of this work is done by hand, making it a time and labour intensive way to create chocolate. 

Person sews chocolate into jiffy bags on a vintage singer sewing machine

Process

Here's a quick rundown of how we make our chocolate. You can also find information about our current Venezuelan cacao here.

Import and sort

Our beans arrive in large sacks, weighing around 65kg each. Before roasting we sort through the beans to find any defective beans or any stones that might be be lurking amongst them. Our current cacao comes from Venezuela. You can find out more about them below.

Roast, crack & winnow

Laid out on trays and roasted to a specific temperature, to develop the flavour and drive off some of the acetic acid and any remaining moisture. The roasting process also causes the outer husk to detach from the inner bean. This is important, because after we crush the beans, we need to winnow them by vacuum - which entails the crushed beans (nibs) being drawn through a series of pipes and separated from the husk in the process. We do this multiple times to ensure the nibs are husk free.

Grind

Two granite wheels turn on a granite plate to crush the nibs, sugar, milk and any other inclusions. The grinders can be running for up to three days to ensure the chocolate is smooth and delicious. Once finished, the chocolate is poured through a sieve to catch any nibs that may have escaped the stone wheels.

Temper & Wrap

Chocolate is crystalline. To get your chocolate to set correctly and achieve that famous snap, we need to temper our chocolate and manipulate it's crystal structure. This involves heating the chocolate and then lowering it to a specific temperature, allowing the crystals within the cacao butter to set up in a way that forms a solid structure. Once the chocolate is at the right temperature, it's deposited into moulds and cooled before being hand-wrapped in gold foil.

Stitch & Label

Every single one of our chocolate bars comes in a Jiffy bag which is sewn shut using one of our many vintage Singer sewing machines. We then label the finished bars and send them on to you to snaffle. To get from bean to bar is a long process and this is only a small portion of of the required steps. Luckily, we really love what we do and we hope you do too!