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Archive | bean sourcing

Knowing your beans

May 24, 2011 by

Last November, while Todd was in Costa Rica on vacation, he went to a Bribri reservation and checked out one of their chocolate houses where he bought some sample beans from the APPTA collective:

He was super excited to try the beans so we roasted them up as soon as he got back. Unfortunately, the batch turned out pretty badly so we had to throw it out. We were busy with other things so we didn’t have a chance to really understand the beans and why they made bad chocolate… until now.

We were doing some cleaning and rediscovered his sample of APPTA beans. Now that we have our own handy Magra, we decided to do a cut test to try and understand what was causing the poor flavor:

As soon as we opened the Magra, it was completely obvious what was wrong. First, there were a lot of unripe beans:

You can spot the unripe beans (in red circles above) by their purple color. They have a pretty neutral flavor to start out but then they get really bitter and nasty, almost like a bad olive. Once this flavor’s in your chocolate, you can’t get rid of it. Our tolerance for unripe beans when making chocolate is near zero and these beans were almost 40% unripe!

Unripe beans were only half of the story, though, as there were a large number of under-fermented beans too:

You can find the under-fermented (again, circled in red above) because they look plump and full (well fermented beans have lots of ridges and look “brainy”). Unlike unripe beans, under-fermented beans don’t add a lot of bad flavor. In fact, they don’t really add flavor at all which means that a few under-fermented beans isn’t going to cause a big issue. However, if you have a lot of under-fermentation, you’re not going to get great flavor. Combine that with a lot of unripe beans and you’ve got a bad recipe.

Unfortunately, because APPTA is a collective, they have a number of challenges, particularly around quality control. With about 1000 producers, it’s really hard to verify that each producer is harvesting at the right time. Worse, because beans are combined across producers, you never know what you’re going to get. Add to that variable genetics across producers and the challenges get even bigger.

So what does all this mean? The take away for us is that there’s no replacement for knowing who’s growing your cacao and how they’re doing it. Without that direct relationship, you’ll never be sure of what you’re going to get: even if you get good stuff once, you may not the next time around. Also, as most cacao farmers have never actually tasted finished chocolate, by going direct we can give them feedback on how their processes affect the end product and how to improve them. Finally, and most importantly, by working directly with the farmers, we can make sure more money goes into their pockets rather than someone in the middle.

Costa Rica Trip

March 18, 2011 by

Last week, I was very fortunate to join the Ecole Chocolate trip to Costa Rica, lead by Julio Fernandez and Steve DeVries.

The trip was fantastic! I met a bunch of great people, including a few other chocolate makers. We know a lot about our own process but it was interesting to hear how other people approach some of the same challenges. We compared notes on machinery, roasting profiles, bean sourcing, permits, packaging, problems, etc.

Julio was an amazing guide to all things historical and natural, including this guy:

It was also great to pepper Steve with questions constantly about all kinds of topics (e.g. growing cacao, fermentation, drying, roasting, refining, bean genetics, monilia). Steve was extraordinarily generous, putting up with everything we threw at him without complaint.

I learned a bunch on the trip, particularly about how to select the best beans and what happens before they show up at our door. One of my favorite things we covered was the cut test using a device call a magra:

By cutting 50 beans all at once, we can inspect for ripeness, fermentation level, average size, and contamination and get a sense of the average quality of the beans in the bag being tested. We can then use that data to compare beans from a number of different growers and identify the best beans.

We also visited a number of different places cacao is grown in Costa Rica, including a large, well-run plantation (Finmac), a native Bribri settlement, and a “permaculture” facility. It was very interesting comparing the different techniques and results used by each group. Here’s the head of workers at Finmac showing a split open, ripe cacao pod:

It didn’t take long for people on the trip to figure out I’m a dog lover, as I’d stop to photograph many of the strays that seem to litter Costa Rica. They were often very thin and showed the scars of a tough life, but they were, for the most part, people friendly:

If you want to see more photos from my trip, I’ve posted the rest of them on Flickr.