I am going to keep this very short. After quite the wait, the new stock of fermented and unfermented Venezuelan Barinas Criollo cocoa beans have arrived. I will begin processing the back orders and get them out ASAP. If you have been waiting to order until they were actually in, here they are. Also, I have been experimenting with the prototype mill from CrankandStein. It works like a charm. It looks like we will be adding a large hopper due to bottlenecking. I had 3 lbs of cocoa beans cracked in a little over a minute even so. With a good strong hair drier set on cool, they winnowed out in only a couple minutes. 3 lbs of cocoa from roaster to nibs in about one half an hour. Sweet!
Finally, we have begun discussing conch/refiner designs with CrankandStein. This could be it folks. The last piece in the Home Chocolatier's Alchemical Laboratory.