Is everyone ready for Thanksgiving? I know I am, mostly for the time off and spending some lovely time with some friends I’ve not seen in a while.

It kind of feels like 2020 has been an absolute roller coaster of dodgeball played with live ammunition. We were doing ok and then coming into the home stretch of the year is seems we got hit a few times.

I am opening a chocolate factory and want to make the best chocolate and know price is very important to sales. What is the cheapest bean you have? They must support the farmer. And can you turn them into nibs for me so I don’t need to buy so much expensive equipment.

What an interesting set of questions I’ve been receiving this last year. Well, I am using the term interesting in sort of a gently sarcastic way. I find them interesting because

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?

When will your next Roasting seminar be?

In the attached, are the temperatures mentioned air temperatures or bean surface temperatures?

As promised last week, the two new crops of previous favorites have landed.

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 know you don’t like chocolate roasted in an oven. There are lots of chocolate out there that have won awards and roast that way. I’m having trouble figuring out how to roast in my oven. The chocolate is only ok or bad. What roasting profile should I use? Can you tell me what temperature I set my oven to and for how long?

Today we have two questions related to Brewing Cocoa and I find one of them really interesting from an assumption standpoint.

While ordering my cocoa beans from a supplier, I came across a couple of unfamiliar terms known as 1. Bean count 110/100gm and 2. Fermented bean percentage 85%. Kindly shed some light into this topic and please let me know if these are acceptable values for making good quality chocolate.

Depending how long you have been with the Chocolate Alchemy maker's family (yes, if you are reading this, you are part of the CA family), this may be an "at last, they are back" announcement or something you have never had the opportunity to experience. In either case, for me it is really exciting. It has been nearly 10 years since I have had beans from Venezuela and over a decade since I had the one from the Cuyagua region.

After last weeks in depth conversation about roasting cocoa in a coffee roaster, I wanted to, nay, needed to take it a little easy this week. There are a bunch of pretty simple questions that don’t really merit a full long winded response but in that there are no stupid questions (that is NOT a challenge folks) I still want to answer them. It also helps clear a little of the back log.

If we can roast cacao with our Diedrich IR12 that would solve everything.

It has been too long since we have had either a new bean or crop in and today I'm happy to announce both.

Sometimes when I break a piece of chocolate, I see white spots inside which I think is little pieces of silk which hasn't melted.

A warm welcome and hello the new year everyone. I’ve quite a bit to let you know about so I hope you can take a few minutes to dig in.