A practical guide to scaling chocolate equipment without guessing. Learn when Behmor + Sylph is enough, when Yoshan + Flux makes sense, and how weekly output, labor, and bottlenecks shape the right upgrade path.

The Flux winnower is here!

I also just watched you winnow using a hair dryer and it looked like it worked well. My only missing piece is cracking the roasted beans. My Question: Rather than purchase a Champion Juicer, I'm wondering if there might be an effective alternate (cheaper) way to accomplish the cracking?

When you make liquor, some solids are screened out by the (Champion) juicer. However, when you just add nibs straight into the melanger, all these solids end up in the chocolate. Is there a difference in the end product either way?

Think of this as the start of a FAQ. I also want to note there are some oddly phrased questions below and I’m leaving them as written, not to make fun of anyone as it is pretty obvious they are from folks who do not speak English as their first language and being monolingual myself, I applaud them for writing in. Their English is worlds better than my Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin or Italian.

I wrote an article yesterday. It was kind of a venting rant session for me. Call it therapy. But I started having doubts that I might be just railing at the world and it wasn’t useful or delivered the message I wanted.

We are starting a new bean to bar factory in the industry so I would like to know what is the best cocoa nibs there is to order for making chocolate? And what equipment do we need?  Can you supply me with a recipe for making the best chocolate?

 1. If I am using the melanger to make Dark Chocolate, I do not make chocolate liquor correct? I just use the roasted/cracked/winnowed cacao nibs and put them directly into the melanger? When would I need to make chocolate liquor?