After grabbing a few hours of sleep, we got up to see Antananarivo. I don’t know what I was expecting when I got here, but it was surprising. Maybe I thought there’d be a parade of lemurs (there wasn’t) but reality has a way of being more complicated, and interesting, than fantasy. The first thing I noticed was how bad the air is (even worse than the air the last time I was in Beijing). After getting passed that, the main city is an interesting combination of rice paddies and more developed areas. Even in the “developed” areas, though, it’s obvious that the standard of living is very low.

Rice is a huge part of the Malagasy diet, so big, that Madagascar has the highest per capita rice consumption in the world. It’s not just rice, though, as there are little corner shops and markets all over the place:

After getting a feel for the city, we visited the Cinagra chocolate factory. Cinagra does all of the chocolate manufacturing for Madécasse, as well as having product lines for Europe and the local Madagascar market. Shahin Cassam Chenai, the man behind Cinagra, gave us a great tour and it was nice talking chocolate making with him.

We ran into a bunch of traffic on the way back through the city, but it worked out as we could walk along the road and through some more markets while we waited for the car to catch up with us. It was a long and very interesting day but, by the end, I was ready to get out of the city and onto the farm… Fortunately, that was exactly the plan for tomorrow.

If you want to see more pictures of the trip, check out our Facebook page.

Alice and I were in Madagascar last week, checking out the farm that supplies the beans for our Madagascar bar. We had very limited access to internet so we’re doing the posts now that we’re back. Hope you enjoy!

The first part of the whole adventure was just getting to Madagascar. It turns out that Madagascar is almost the antipode for San Francisco, meaning that it’s almost exactly halfway around the world from us. Originally, Alice and I had planned on taking the same flights over but after a missed alarm and an airport shuttle no-show, I’d be setting out first and Alice would be joining a day or two later. My route to get there was San Francisco (SFO) -> Atlanta (ATL) -> Paris (CDG) -> Antananarivo (TNR):

The total distance, according to Google Maps, is just under 12,000 miles. I left SFO on Saturday at 7:40am (PST) and arrived in Tana (the French colonial shorthand for Antananarivo) on Monday at 3am (GMT + 3), which means those 12,000 miles turned into about 36 hours straight of plane travel. The only good thing about flying for that long is that by the time we got to Madagascar, my body was so confused that I didn’t have much trouble adjusting to the new timezone. I met up with Bertil Akesson, the son of owner of the farm and the one who handles bean sales, in Paris for the flight to TNR:

I also met  Olvier Coppeneur as he would be joining us on the trip:

After landing, we had to pass through immigration, which took almost an hour:

We picked up our luggage (fortunately no bags were lost) and exchanged some money. The currency in Madagascar is the Ariary and $1 is worth about 2000 Ariary, which means when you exchange a few hundred dollars, you get this:

I felt pretty flush with cash until I realized a bottle of water cost 3000 Ariary :( Pockets stuffed with bills, we grabbed one of the ubiquitous taxis and headed to the hotel. The main roads from the airport were fine, but as we got closer to where we’d be staying, the “road” turned into an almost impassable series for bumps, ruts, and rocks. Our taxi driver navigated it expertly, though, and we made it. I should point out, by the way, that hotel can conjure images of plush beds and fresh towels but that’s not exactly what our accommodations were like. The room was clean and had electricity and there was a shared shower (in the laundry room) and a shared bathroom (the sink broke shortly after arrival, though). When we asked about internet, we got a quizzical look from the owner of the establishment… and no, there was no room service :) We were all exhausted and so we went straight to bed so we’d be ready to see Tana in the morning.

We’re thrilled to hear that we were chosen as a finalist for the 2012 Good Food Awards. Nine bean-to-bar companies were chosen out of countless submissions and we are happy to be considered in such good company. Here’s the full list of chocolate finalists:

• Amano Artisan Chocolate, Guayas Utah
• Bittersweet, Rich Milk California
• Dandelion Chocolate, 70% Costa Rica California
• Escazu Artisan Chocolate, 60% Goat’s Milk & 65% Costa Rica North Carolina
• Fresco Chocolate, 214 Madagascar 74% & 217 Chuao 70% Washington
• Lillie Belle Farms, Perfect Illusion 65 Oregon
• Patric Chocolate, LLC, PBJ OMG & Signature 70% Blend Missouri
• Rogue Chocolatier, Inc., Hispaniola & Sambirano Massachusetts
• Theo Chocolate, Theo and Jane Goodall 70% Dark Chocolate Washington

In other news, Cam and Alice are deep in the jungles of Madagascar visiting Bertil at the cacao farm. I wouldn’t say there’s a lot of internet out there, but I did manage to get a quick update from Cam that he made it there in one piece. Updates to follow.

We’ve been churning through our supply of cacao and we’re almost out of a few of our origins. That, by itself, isn’t a problem as we always like trying new beans and looking for great flavors. While looking for beans, we got a sample of beans from Ghana. We roasted them up, put them in our sample molds, and tasted them. They were delicious and aromatic, with flavors like clove and cinnamon that reminded us of a Christmas cookie.

We called the broker who sent us the sample to ask him some questions about the beans and where they came from. Unfortunately, the more we learned the more concerns we had about them. They are “conventional” (no certifications) which can be ok if you know how the beans are grown. The big problem, though, is that the beans aren’t traceable beyond the Ghana Cocoa Board. The Cocobod, as it’s called, fixes the price for most cacao produced by Ghana, in theory to protect the farmers from volatile prices. This creates a couple of a challenges though. First, there’s nothing to stop the Cocobod from setting the price arbitrarily low and keeping the difference between the world market price and the artificially low price for themselves. In fact, that’s happened numerous times in the Cocobod’s 50+ year history. Even if prices are set fairly, there’s no way to trace the cacao after it’s been sold by the Cocobod, making it impossible to set up direct trade with the farmer in the future. Even worse, there’s no way to verify the cacao has been grown without child or slave labor.

With all of this information, we had to make a decision: buy great beans with potentially questionable backgrounds or pass on them and find something else with great flavor. It’s often challenging to make this decision when you have something tasty in your hand. But, as we discussed it, we knew we couldn’t buy these beans in good conscience. This doesn’t mean that Ghana doesn’t have some great cacao or that it’s not possible for people to buy it responsibly. However, there wasn’t a way for us to responsibly buy this cacao given the size of our orders and the sources we have access to at the moment.

So, the search for great cacao continues… and to that end, Alice and I are off to Madagascar!

Last week, I went home to Texas to visit my family. While I was there, I took off for the day to meet Bertil Akesson. He grows cacao in Madagascar and Brazil. His farm in Madagascar supplies most of the world’s best chocolate makers with ripe-tasting, fruity beans. He’s worked for years to refine his growing, harvesting, fermenting, and drying techniques.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to meet Bertil at his farms in either Madagascar or Brazil. Instead, we met, ate, and had a great conversation at an Indian restaurant in downtown Houston. We already know that sourcing great beans in quantities large enough to sustain our factory will be one of our biggest challenges, so it was exciting to talk directly to someone that has so much experience with cacao. The closer we can get to the trees, the better the chocolate we can make.

After preparing our palate by eating a bunch of Indian food, we tasted each other’s chocolate. In addition to exporting cacao, Bertil makes single plantation chocolate from criollo beans on his own farm. Whenever we taste different chocolate bars made from the same beans, we’re always struck by how different the final product is. Both our bars and Bertil’s bars, though, tasted remarkably similar, with both packing the same fruity punch. As we posted earlier, we just received 5 new bags of beans from Bertil’s farm in Madagascar and I think there are more in our future!

We spent all week anxiously watching for tracking updates on our new bags of Madagascar beans as they made their way across the country. Finally, on Friday at 6pm, George, the freight truck driver, pulled up to our garage lab with five new bags. We were a little scared when he hopped down and told us “Amigos. We have a problem.” We had visions of bean explosions and hours of cleaning up our 375,000 beans that would be swimming around the truck.

After a tense moment, we luckily discovered that the bags were still intact and the crisis was that they were stuck behind all of George’s other palettes filled with giant deliveries. That, and he had a broken lift gate.

Since Cam is pretty skinny, he managed to squeeze through the crevices of boxes and pull the bags out one by one. We then found ourselves carrying the 750lbs about 150 feet by hand  all under 10 minutes– it was like the chocolate olympics.

Needless to say, we are pretty excited about these beans and can’t wait to roast them up and share them with you. Stay tuned!

We’re down to our last 100 bars of Madagascar. We’ll have a few for sale at this Thursday’s Mission Community Market, but we will probably run out soon thereafter.  For a little while, you may be able to find some at nearby retail locations, including Fog City News where Adam has placed an order for our final supply.

We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the response from this bar. It’s fruity flavor is undeniable — maybe even overwhelming. At farmer’s markets, we watch for people’s eyes to bulge when the first fruity notes kick in. We’ve had people come up to us and buy every Madagascar bar on hand. At last week’s market, a woman approached us an hour before the market opened, even before we had unpacked our tent, to ask if we had any Madagascar.  We rummaged through our unpacked boxes to locate a bar for her.  Before we could even count her change, she had ripped open the wrapper and downed half the bar. It’s moments like these that make us really happy to be in the chocolate business.

Since this bar has been so popular, you may be wondering why we are discontinuing it. The answer is that our approach to making chocolate is a quite a bit different than most large chocolate makers. There can be a lot of variability between each bag of beans but for a large chocolate maker, variability is the enemy. Instead, they’re focused on flavor consistency and cost control. Every Hershey’s bar tastes the same and in some ways that’s great — it’s a sort of miracle of industrialization. However, to achieve consistency, it means you need a large supply of relatively similar beans that you roast heavily (and, in our opinion, over roast) to reduce individual flavor differences and add additional ingredients that cover up or soften whatever flavor is left (e.g. vanilla, cocoa butter, or worse).

We take the opposite approach — each bag of beans is different and we like to find the highest quality beans we can and then get out of the way. Rather than stamp out the individual flavors for the sake of consistency, we like to let the individual nuances shine through, unadulterated by additional ingredients other than pure cane sugar. We roast the beans as minimally as possible, trying to find the strongest and most interesting flavors that characterize the cacao bean’s individual personality.

For each bag of beans, including bags from the same farm as our last batch, we run a battery of taste tests — usually 2-3 rounds involving 3-4 batches each — until we are sure we’ve found the best flavor out of that bag. And after all of that work, usually about two weeks, if we are not 100% thrilled with what we’ve made and proud to put our name on it, we won’t bring it to market, even if it means eating the cost of that bag of beans. For anyone who’s optimizing cost, efficiency, or consistency, this approach is nuts — but it ensures that we always have something we are proud of.

This means each batch is essentially limited-edition — the flavors change with the season, the harvest, and the fermentation. So while this Summer 2011 Madagascar is coming to an end, fear not, as we have 5 new bags of new Madagascar on the way that we are looking forward to bringing out sometime next month. The early samples exhibit some of that same great fruit flavor and we are excited to bring it out for you all to try.

We just got a few new bags of beans in (we’re still trying to get as many different beans as we can). Obviously, the bags don’t come with roasting instructions so each time we get a new bag, it’s fun to try and coax out the best flavor. We have a lot of taste tests to do :)

Last November, while Todd was in Costa Rica on vacation, he went to a Bribri reservation and checked out one of their chocolate houses where he bought some sample beans from the APPTA collective:

He was super excited to try the beans so we roasted them up as soon as he got back. Unfortunately, the batch turned out pretty badly so we had to throw it out. We were busy with other things so we didn’t have a chance to really understand the beans and why they made bad chocolate… until now.

We were doing some cleaning and rediscovered his sample of APPTA beans. Now that we have our own handy Magra, we decided to do a cut test to try and understand what was causing the poor flavor:

As soon as we opened the Magra, it was completely obvious what was wrong. First, there were a lot of unripe beans:

You can spot the unripe beans (in red circles above) by their purple color. They have a pretty neutral flavor to start out but then they get really bitter and nasty, almost like a bad olive. Once this flavor’s in your chocolate, you can’t get rid of it. Our tolerance for unripe beans when making chocolate is near zero and these beans were almost 40% unripe!

Unripe beans were only half of the story, though, as there were a large number of under-fermented beans too:

You can find the under-fermented (again, circled in red above) because they look plump and full (well fermented beans have lots of ridges and look “brainy”). Unlike unripe beans, under-fermented beans don’t add a lot of bad flavor. In fact, they don’t really add flavor at all which means that a few under-fermented beans isn’t going to cause a big issue. However, if you have a lot of under-fermentation, you’re not going to get great flavor. Combine that with a lot of unripe beans and you’ve got a bad recipe.

Unfortunately, because APPTA is a collective, they have a number of challenges, particularly around quality control. With about 1000 producers, it’s really hard to verify that each producer is harvesting at the right time. Worse, because beans are combined across producers, you never know what you’re going to get. Add to that variable genetics across producers and the challenges get even bigger.

So what does all this mean? The take away for us is that there’s no replacement for knowing who’s growing your cacao and how they’re doing it. Without that direct relationship, you’ll never be sure of what you’re going to get: even if you get good stuff once, you may not the next time around. Also, as most cacao farmers have never actually tasted finished chocolate, by going direct we can give them feedback on how their processes affect the end product and how to improve them. Finally, and most importantly, by working directly with the farmers, we can make sure more money goes into their pockets rather than someone in the middle.