We added a new round of Chocolate 101 classes to our online store. Our classes are a chance to come have a little fun with us in our Dogpatch factory space. Cam and I had a blast teaching last month. A few people have emailed us about doing it again, so we decided to teach it at the end of every month. Right now, tickets for March – June are available in our online store. We’ll cover all the chocolate basics: ingredients, sourcing, and making, with a tour of our space and lots to taste. We’d love to have you here.

We’ve had an awesome morning working with Liza Mosquito de Guia. She’s shooting a video for The Next Big Small Brand- we found out this weekend that we’re finalists. It’s a bi-coastal competition for small food businesses. Whether or not we win, we’ve had a lot of fun filming. We all struggled to work slowly for the camera and there were a few antics. Cam tried to toss a piece of chocolate into the air and catch it in his mouth, but failed miserably. Other than that, I’d say it was a pretty successful morning!

Don’t forget, we’ll be teaching Chocolate 101 next Wednesday night in our space. There are 15 spots and we’d love to see you there. Tickets are available in our store.

The other night David and John from Supermechanical stopped by to talk about their latest project- Twine. They recently raised one of the highest totals ever on kickstarter and are now working to keep up with an overwhelming demand. We met because we’d love to have Twines all over our factory. For example, we imagine using them to help us log data from our roaster and the ambient conditions. Months after a roast, we’d be able check the humidity and internal and external temperatures to help us understand any batch variation. We sometimes notice subtle differences in taste or viscosity between batches from the same beans and more data would help us get a better handle on the cause.

David and John came by during a whirlwind trip to the bay area- you can read about their take on our factory on their blog. We were really happy to spend a few hours talking about the joys of building machines. It seems like they have a lot of momentum behind their idea and are incredibly excited to move forward. They promised to stop by with prototypes for us to play with in April and we hope to have a factory decked out with Twines someday soon.

Don’t forget, we’ll be teaching Chocolate 101 next Wednesday night in our space. There are 15 spots and we’d love to see you there. Tickets are available in our store.

The next time you’re walking down Valencia Street craving our chocolate and eagerly awaiting our factory, you can make a stop at Four Barrel. As of last week, all of their chocolate drinks are made with our Madagascar.

We stopped by the cafe late last month to make a few test drinks. Our tasting wasn’t nearly as intense as the last time we made hot chocolate, but we did taste drinks made with our Colombia, Costa Rica, and Madagascar. Initially, we thought the Colombia would be best as a simple, sweet drinking chocolate, but the fruitiness of our Madagascar tasted incredible with Four Barrel’s coffee. The complexity of the chocolate played really well with the rich milk and espresso.

Our working with Four Barrel is an awesome partnership. We admired their space long before we met Jeremy and the rest of the crew. We’d be lucky to have a place as welcoming and good looking. And as two roasters on the same street, there’s a pretty unique opportunity for collaboration. When we open on Valencia, we’ll serve their coffee along with all of our hot chocolates.

Don’t forget, we’ll be teaching Chocolate 101 next Wednesday night in our space. There are 15 spots and we’d love to see you there. Tickets are available in our store.

Chiann and I wrapped our 10,000th bar last Friday night. We’ve been counting the packs of foil we’ve used from the beginning. When we finished our last pack, we’d wrapped a full 10,000.

We snuck a golden ticket into the bar. Chiann created an awesome origami envelope with a note from us inside. If you’re lucky enough to open this bar, there’s a surprise waiting for you. 10,000 bars has been a lot of work, especially without oompa loompas to help, but it’s also been a lot of fun. We had to do something to celebrate and a nod to one of our favorite chocolate factories seemed just right.

We’re offering our first class! We’re really excited about chocolate education. As we get closer to opening our space on Valencia, we’re starting to think about the different classes and tours we’ll host there. We’re teaching Chocolate 101 in our production kitchen in the Dogpatch, but this is just the start of a big part of our mission for our factory and cafe space.

This is a class for 15 people from 7-9 PM on February 29th. It’ll be an all around introduction to chocolate. We’ll cover the different types of chocolate, their ingredients, our chocolate making process, and a little about single origin bars. You’ll leave well-versed in the chocolate basics.

We’ll start the night out with a little chocolate treat, have a discussion about chocolate making, then a tour of our space, and plenty of time for your questions. We’ll taste chocolate in all of its unfinished and finished forms and provide samples of all we try for you to take home and share your knowledge.

We just added tickets to our online store, available to the first 15 interested people. We’d love to have you there.

We’re working hard this Friday, getting things together for the Noe Valley Farmers Market tomorrow and for our event at Love & Luxe.

We’ve had Venezuelan bars at the Noe market for the past few weeks, but tomorrow we’ll bring the last 9 bars we’ve made. We’re making progress toward getting more Venezuelan beans. We have a few bags from Ocumare on their way shortly, and hopefully part of a container coming in a few months. For now, come and get the last bars we have on hand!

I’m also busy making chocolate gems for our event tomorrow night at Love & Luxe. This is the closest I think we’ll come to making heart-shaped chocolates for Valentine’s. I needed a way to transport the gems to the event without them scuffing, so I’m using the foil liners that came free with our new molds. I think the gems look pretty festive this way. If you’re strolling through the Mission tomorrow night, stop by and say hello.

We’re teaming up with Love & Luxe, a beautiful jewelry store by the site of our Valencia Street space, to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Join us next Saturday night, February 11, for A Love Supreme from 5 – 10 PM at Love & Luxe, 1169 Valencia Street. Admission to the event is free and you’ll find unique Valentine’s Day gift ideas all around. We’ll be there with our chocolate and Blue Angel Vodka will offer samples of their own.  Even better, 5% of Love & Luxe jewelry sales and proceeds from the sale of work from the Visual Aid Pillow Project will go towards Visual Aid. It should be a blast and I hope you can come by.

Things move quickly around here. So quickly, that it’s been a few months since Cam and I went to Madagascar and he first posted about getting there. I made it a day or two behind Cam, after missing my first flight. Taking the trip on my own kept things interesting! I found myself texting Cam from the tiny port of Ankify, desperately hoping that he’d find me. I haven’t had many happier reunions.

Here are a few different clips from our trip. I’m starting with my favorite. It showcases my pro pod-opening skills.

Cam was not a pro.

Truthfully, neither of us was really that good.

After the pods are opened, the workers pull the beans from the pods.

At SOMIA, we watched a worker move the beans between fermentation boxes.

After fermentation, the beans are raked into an even layer and dried in the sun.

At Millot, workers hand sort the broken beans and junk from the good beans.

We also saw beans being washed. This gives them a cleaner appearance for later enrobing.

This video shows the beans emptying from the washer. It also shows how our stomachs felt at the time…

Millot’s distillery smelled amazing. They distill lemongrass, ylang ylang, and a few other essential oils. I wish we had smell-o-vision.

That’s just a taste of my stories from Madagascar. The lemur pictures are still to come.