Professor Crankenstein..

..was the name of our original hand crank winnowing device...it wasn't much bigger than a Mr. Coffee. However, we've graduated to bigger and better devices to do our chocolate bidding. I guess it's comparable to suffering through the old hand crank ice cream churns and having a nice, new sorbet machine. The cocoa bean winnower that you've probably already seen in the short video we've had for a while has been received, put together and tested in our production space here at our east side shop. It's loud as hell but it can crank through several pounds of beans in no time flat allowing us to shell beans in a flash! We owe a great deal of thanks to John Vessa and his wife Kim who single-handedly (well, almost) built this monstrosity, shipped it to us, and flew up here to train us and rebuild it in our shop. We are definitely indebted to these two confectionery veterans (his wife created Airheads!)

So now that we have our roaster, winnower and temperer we're in need of only a few more pieces to complete the puzzle. Testing begins soon!

Cuckoo for cocoa pods..

..or at least what's inside of them! We've received our first shipment of cocoa beans which consists of approx. 2400 lbs of Panamanian and Ecuadorian beans. We've been roasting, refining and tempering beans from literally around the globe (Domincan Republic, Ghana, Ivory Coast, ect, ect) trying to find the cocoa beans that really encapsulate the flavor we want to come out of the gate with. And that's not to say we won't come back to beans we've passed on in the beginning to create future bars..we just have a certain vision for our numero uno. It's really interesting how beans from different regions can vary so greatly..Dominican beans have raisin-y notes, Ivory Coast has heavy chocolate notes but not much in substance on the end. I think with our choices we might have it just right.

So, in the very near future we're certain to be dropping beans down the hopper and spreading the rich aroma of roasting cocoa beans to East Nashville..or at least our little portion of it.

we like machines part 2

The most important piece of the chocolate puzzle has arrived - the cocoa roaster. This beast roasts 50 pounds per batch at up to 125,000 BTU's. It's pretty serious piece of machinery! We had originally received it two weeks ago but it somehow got a bit mangled in transit. So it had to be sent back and repaired. Our duct guy came out yesterday and got the cool and hot air venting completed and piped out our smokestack. Finally feels like we're rolling!

we like machines..

After a few weeks of radio silence (could have bored you with FDA meeting blog posts but decided better of it) I'm proud to announce the production equipment is finally starting to roll in. This week our chocolate tempering machine has arrived unscathed in the delivery process. Why temper chocolate? In the tempering process the machine heats the chocolate, cools it down, then brings it back up to the melting point again. The reason for doing this is to stabilize the cocoa butter crystals so they are all uniform in size. The result is a shiny luster to the chocolate and that satisfying snap when you break off a piece. In the very near future more machinery will continue to roll in hopefully resulting in production as soon as next month!

Most of the work at our location has been completed. Our giant chalkboard (we gotta put our ideas somewhere) will be wrapped up this weekend as well as few other small projects. We'll definitely keep you posted and hopefully add some new video this weekend. Oh, I forgot to mention, we'll have our logo worked out soon as well! That means we get to do some cool stuff like: create our building sign, order some awesome hats, make t-shirts, jumpsuits, petwear...you get the idea.