We’ve been pretty busy for the past few weeks making lots of chocolate for a very large order. But, we’re done(!) and looking forward to the rest of the summer. The opening of our space on Valencia is on the horizon and we’re doing lots of planning and prepping. It’s exciting and terrifying that the space will be ready within the next few months!

In addition, we’re working with our neighbors in the Mission and our neighbors in the Dogpatch on two great events this month. We’ll be teaming up with 18 Reasons and Pete Slosberg (of Pete’s Wicked Ale and Cocoa Pete’s) to host a beer and chocolate tasting on July 25 from 7-9 PM at 18 Reasons, 3674 18th Street. We’ll talk about the overlap between the processes of making the two foods and taste how well they work together. Tickets are available here.

We’ll also be showing off our current kitchen space as part of SF Made‘s Dogpatch factory tour on July 13 from 2-4 PM. On the tour, guests will stop by Maison de Monaco, Barbary Brix, Sutton Cellars, and our factory. It’s a great area, full of small businesses making beautiful products, and SF Made will make a perfect tour guide. Tickets for this event are available here.

We hope you can make it one of the two events, we’re looking forward to both!

We are extremely excited to announce a collaboration with our soon-to-be Valencia St. neighbors, 826 Valencia! As stated on their website, 826 Valencia is a nonprofit organization that provides writing and tutoring assistance to students aged 6-18, with the belief that strong writing skills are crucial to future success. Their offerings include evening and weekend workshops designed to sharpen writing skills and foster creativity — which is where we come in!

All throughout the month of June at 826 Valencia, Alice and I will be leading a free writing workshop based around the theme of — what else? — chocolate. We’ll be teaching students all about the chocolate-making process, and using that as a springboard for them to come up with their own chocolate-inspired literary or artistic creations, be they in haiku, short story, poem or pictorial form. These student writings will be collected and published in a chapbook, which will be available at our factory space as well as the Pirate Store.

If you know of any young writers or chocolate enthusiasts who would like to participate in our workshop, they can sign up here. It’s a 4-week workshop, with each session held from 6-8 pm on Wednesday evenings. The first one starts next week, June 6. It is free to sign up and participate; the only stipulation is that you have to be between the ages of 12 and 15. Oh, and you have to love chocolate. It would be wonderful to see you there!

Please stay tuned for other exciting collaboration news between Dandelion Chocolate and 826 Valencia! (Hint: You know who else loves chocolate? Pirates. Pirates adore chocolate. Entire pirate nations have been lost on account of chocolate.)

All images credited to 826 Valencia.

To sign up for our writing workshop at 826 Valencia, please click here.

For more about 826 Valencia, please click here.

To find out if there is a local 826 chapter close to you, please click here.

I’m taking a trip to Boston this weekend and so is our chocolate. We met one of our retailers, Formaggio Kitchen, at the Good Food Awards in January. They won for their in-house charcuterie and had a chance to taste our chocolate while visiting SF. Awesomely, they were one of the first shops to bring our chocolate to the east coast, introducing it to a whole new set of customers. They snapped this photo at one of their first tasting sessions, saying that our bars are a perfect after-dinner treat.

While I’m visiting this weekend, I’ll host a tasting on Saturday from 11 AM – 2 PM at their shop in Cambridge. If you live nearby, come visit! I’ll have our three bars to taste and I’ll be ready to answer any questions about making chocolate from the bean. Hope to see you there!

If you’d like to learn more about chocolate making, take a look at Chocolate 101 in our online store.

A little bit ago, we wrapped our 10,000th bar with a golden ticket inside. We did it right, too. We mixed it in with all our other bars and purposefully lost track of it. That weekend, we packed up for the farmer’s market and for our event at Love and Luxe. A few weeks went by and we didn’t hear anything. We figured the bar came back with the leftovers from the market, went to a wholesaler, and likely made its way across the country. Then, we found it!

Betsy, the owner of Love and Luxe, wrote us a very happy email saying that she’d opened the bar and found the golden ticket! We put together a box of treats for her and dropped it off a week ago. The box was a celebration of 10,000 bars, so it had to be awesome. We included lots of bars, whole roasted beans, nibs, pocky, ground chocolate for drinking and baking, and chocolate gems made with Betsy in mind.

I was lucky enough to bring it to her shop. Betsy was thrilled. After our Valentine’s event, she was so excited about chocolate that she bought 5 or 6 bars. She gave most of them away as gifts, but kept one for herself, buried in her purse. When she finally opened it, there was the ticket! Lesson learned, keeping chocolate all to yourself really pays off.

If you’d like to learn more about chocolate making, take a look at Chocolate 101 in our online store.

We all felt a little self-conscious watching this, but we have our first video!

Todd did an excellent job telling our story, but my favorite part should be obvious. Our videographer,  Liza, included Cam’s chocolate air toss antics, and they’re pretty good.

Todd and Caitlin are headed to New York at the end of the month for The Next Big Small Brand contest. It’s Caitlin’s first trip to the city, so it should be a great time all around.

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.

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.