Pod from the cacao tree with cacao beans

Of all the things I’ve learned in my life, learning to make chocolate from cacao beans has been one of the most gratifying. Give someone a piece of chocolate and feed them for a day. Teach someone to make chocolate, and feed their soul for a lifetime.

It was a rainy day in Costa Rica with tropical storm Eta raging across Central America and bringing more rain than usual for November. I took a right turn in Huacas in front of one of the best panaderías in the area and headed to a grocery store in Villareal to pass the afternoon and noticed a small billboard in English on the side of the road — Reina’s Chocolate. Being a chocolate lover for many years, I was immediately interested. About another kilometer went by and I saw the same billboard, but this time I noticed that it offered chocolate-making classes. Now, I was hooked. The store/factory was just about a half a kilometer from the grocery store I was headed to, so I stopped by to check it out.

Ron, an American expat married to Nica-Tica (a woman from Nicaragua who emigrated to Costa Rica) greeted me at the door and asked if I was alone. He was in the middle of a class with another couple and with the COVID pandemic going on, he wanted to limit interaction. Through my mask, I let him know that I was by myself and interested in the advertised chocolate-making class. He ushered me in.

The smell of warm cocoa hit me as I passed through the door of his showroom/factory. That deep earthy smell of cocoa beans being ground into chocolate paste overwhelms you and instantly makes you feel like wrapping yourself in a blanket next to a warm fire to watch some cheesy movie with someone you love. It smells like comfort. I imagine that if love had a smell, it would smell a lot like the aroma of dark chocolate being melanged in a wet grinder with raw sugar. It was love at first smell.

Reina prepared me a cup of cocoa tea made by soaking cocoa bean husks in boiling water as Ron introduced me to the couple that was just finishing up their chocolate experience in his showroom. They were all smiles and looked like they had spent the afternoon cuddling in a hammock on the beach watching the tide change and exchanging kisses instead of sitting at the counter in chocolate factory showroom. They had some sort of chocolate-tasting afterglow about them.

I sipped at the tea and listened to Ron describe the class, but after smelling the chocolate and seeing the look on the couple’s faces, I was sold already. We set a time for my wife, Britt, and I to attend his class the next week.

The next week we arrived at for the class a few minutes early, anxious to learn about bean-to-bar chocolate making using cocoa beans from Costa Rica. After a short introduction and a few instructions, Ron began telling us about the history of chocolate, including stories about ancient priestly rituals to modern chocolate icons. Cacao has been around for centuries in Mesoamerica. The cacao bean was used as bartering currency, for creating cocoa butter for treating burns, and for making a rich and bitter drink used during religious rituals. Cortés introduced cocoa to the Spanish royal court upon his return, but it was a few decades before they started mixing it with sugar and it became an exotic drink in high demand. Chocolate as we know it today is a relatively modern invention developed by a flurry of inventions and innovations which created chocolate in solid form in the mid to late 1800s. Chocolate is a modern miracle.

The process for making chocolate involves several key steps: harvesting the cacao beans, fermenting the cacao beans, drying the cacao beans, roasting the cacao beans, husking the cacao beans, grinding the cacao beans into nibs, winnowing the husks away from the nibs, wet grinding (melanging) the nibs into chocolate liquor, mixing the sugar and other ingredients in the wet grinder to produce chocolate paste, conching the chocolate, tempering the chocolate, and pouring the chocolate into molds. Each step in the process can change the texture, taste, and body of the chocolate and requires artisan skill to get premium chocolate.

Roasted cacao beans

Most manufacturers of chocolate rely on an average cacao bean with a standardized process of adding additional ingredients such soy lecithin, cocoa butter, sugar, and powdered milk to cover any imperfections in the bean. However, craft chocolate makers do not have that luxury. They must ensure that the raw product at the beginning of the project is superior and that the process is carefully controlled to produce a chocolate worthy of being called artisan chocolate.

We spent the morning learning about the bean itself and followed it through the process to the wet grinder. It was on the job training and we helped David, one of Ron’s employee, move the beans along the production cycle to the wet grinder. The wet grinder uses a turning drum with a granite base and two granite rollers that are tightened by a spring to grind the cocoa and added ingredients (in this case just sugar) into small particles. We poured in the cocoa nibs and the sugar and left it humming along as Reina and Ron rolled out the tasting tray and prepared us to sample small amounts of artisan chocolate produced in the facility. 

“The first thing you have to learn is not to eat the chocolate,” warned Ron. “You can’t taste chocolate with your teeth.”

We closed our eyes and let each piece slowly melt on our tongues exploding in our mouth with flavors inherent to the superior bean and released by the artisan process. Craft chocolate is not meant to be eaten. It is meant to be experienced. Each piece was a slice of heaven on the tongue. (No wonder the Mesoamericans considered chocolate to be the drink of the gods.)

Britt pouring chocolate

 to the wet grinder to check on the progress. The human tongue is amazing and can detect particle sizes down to 20 microns. The wet grinder needs to pulverize all the particles until they are smaller than 20 microns to ensure the silky-smooth taste everyone enjoys in chocolate. Our batch of chocolate had only been grinding for a couple of hours and was nowhere near that smooth. Good chocolate usually takes anywhere from twelve to seventy-two hours (or more) of grinding and conching to get the particle size below 20 microns. However, the taste was rich and vibrant in our batch in spite of the fact it had only been grinding a couple of hours. For the sake of experiencing each step, we poured our chocolate from the wet grinder into the molds and put them in the cooler for setting.

The only step we did not experience was tempering. According to Ron (and most other craft chocolate makers) it is the most difficult, and maddening, step. Chocolate is so appealing to the human tongue because its melting point is a few degrees below the average body temperature. The problem is that the six crystals in chocolate melt at different temperatures and behave differently. Crystal number five is the most desirable because of how it behaves in storage and with the human tongue. Tempering is the process of getting all the crystals to cooperate together and bond with the fifth crystal properly so that they all behave similarly. (If you want to understand the chemistry behind it, just Google chocolate tempering and you can spend hours trying to understand it.) If you have ever seen the chocolatiers pour chocolate on a marble slab and spread it with special metal spatulas while wearing a funny hat, you have seen one method of tempering. Because he didn’t want to overwhelm us, we skipped that step and took home twelve bars of fresh chocolate.

Sometimes in life we experience something or learn something that changes us or enlightens us in such a way that we are drawn, even compelled, down a path of learning and exploration we never expected. Learning and experiencing the chocolate making process had that effect on me. That night in our condo, I got online and researched the various machines for making chocolate at home. I watched videos about roasting beans, husking beans, wet-grinding beans, and yes even tempering chocolate. Like most hobbies or endeavors, it would take a few hundred dollars to get started, but everything was available on Amazon and could be delivered to my house by the time we got back from Costa Rica. I put a few items in my cart, but didn’t purchase them yet.

A few days later I stopped by and talked with Ron again and mentioned how intrigued I was by the class. He told me if I really wanted to start making craft chocolate at home when I got back, I needed to come spend some more time at his factory. This invitation was unexpected, but I took him up on it and went back to his facility to work through all the steps again. I have since discovered that there is a fraternity of sorts among bean-to-bar chocolate makers and this kind of mentorship is not uncommon. It must be the chocolate.

With Ron and David’s help, I roasted, husked, winnowed, and ground a batch of beans into nibs ready for wet grinding. He also let me keep the husks for making chocolate tea. He coached me on the various steps and reviewed the equipment list I was prepared to order. When I flew home to Arizona, I had two kilos of raw materials stashed in one of my suitcases. I was ready to make chocolate at home.

My first batch of chocolate

It felt like Christmas when I pulled the wet grinder from the box and set it up. With my limited experience, I measured the nibs and sugar before cranking up the machine and beginning my first batch of 70% dark chocolate. The machine was louder than I remembered, but it filled the house with the rich aroma of chocolate. I watched the process carefully, tasting the batch everytime I dipped the spatula into the machine to scrape the sides of the drum. My taste buds were in heaven! Sixteen hours later, I poured my first batch of dark chocolate into the molds. I had become a bean-to-bar chocolatier.

I posted a few pictures of my chocolate creations on social media and soon learned the everyone wants to be your friend when you have chocolate. People I hadn’t heard from in years wanted to stop by in the middle of a pandemic and visit. Others offered to provide their services as tasters and quality control. Requests came in for me to ship bars of chocolate with the Christmas cards we were sending out. I learned that chocolate brings people together.

My first chocolate bars

Over the next few weeks, I made several more batches of chocolate. It didn’t take long for me to use up all of the nibs I had brought back from Costa Rica, and I had to order some from other sources. The nibs from the Dominican Republic had a fruity, cherry taste. The nibs from Ecuador smelled like chocolate brownies ready to pull from the oven. When I let my wife smell the nibs from Peru, she immediately noticed the passion fruit smell. Each different source of beans was unique and provided a rich blend of tastes and smells making for a unique chocolate each time. 

Who knew how much impact a small billboard on the side of the road on a rainy day in Costa Rica would have on my life? Since that day, I have learned to turn the cacao bean into a bar of delightful chocolate. I have visited a working cacao farm and factory. I have made new friends, and rekindled a few old friendships, all because of chocolate. I could have easily ignored the signs, or simply just purchased a few craft chocolate bars from Ron that day to satisfy my chocolate cravings.

Instead, I chose the satisfying journey of learning to make bean-to-bar chocolate, and it has been a delicious journey.