We know that chocolate and Valentine’s Day go very well together, so we created a box of our favorite treats for you to give to your loved ones this holiday.

Our boxes include some of our favorite items from our new factory and cafe on Valencia Street. We included each of our own single-origin bars, from Ambanja, Madagascar; Elvesia, Dominican Republic; and Rio Caribe, Venezuela. In addition, our box also features treats from two local chocolatiers who use our Rio Caribe chocolate to make delicious confections for our retail space. We have chocolate covered nibs and caramelized almonds from Feve and chocolate covered shortbread cookies from Kika’s Treats. Shawn at Feve and Cristina at Kika’s Treats were two of our favorite neighbors in the Dogpatch. We’re very happy to collaborate with them now that we’ve moved to the Mission. And, they make our box of Valentine’s Day goodies that much more delicious!

This box is available for pick-up only. You can preorder a gift box in our online store until Wednesday evening. If you do place an order, please come pick up your box at 740 Valencia Street on February 14th, from 11 AM – 6 PM.

And! If you’d like to tuck a special note inside your box, Pam from Shotwell Paper Mill will be outside our factory and cafe from 12 PM – 5 PM on Thursday letterpress printing custom valentines on paper made from our cacao sacks! Her notes begin, “I love it when,” and you can finish the sentence with a message to your loved ones. All together, it should be a very special day here at Dandelion.

I’m very excited to share a video that Hannah Radcliff put together for us earlier this fall. Hannah lives in St. Louis, but stopped at Four Barrel on a recent trip to San Francisco and discovered our chocolate. She wrote to us asking if she could make a video about our “rich and delicious” chocolate on her next trip, and of course we said “yes!”

She recently posted the video as part of a travelogue by FEAST magazine. Her video turned out beautifully. It does a fantastic job of introducing each step of our process and each member of our production team. Thank you, Hannah!

We all came back from the holidays refreshed, and it’s a good thing. We’ve been busy over the past few weeks. We celebrated our space with friends, family, neighbors, and a group of amazing chocolate makers. Cam’s worked hard to whip our machines into shape and increase our production. Todd, Brian, Phil, and our cafe team opened our cafe! There have been many milestones and plenty of reasons to celebrate. Thank you to everyone who helped and supported us over the past few weeks.

Now, we’re ready for the next holiday. And, it’s a chocolatey one! Because of the production team’s hard work and a few process improvements, we were able to open our online store last week. We hoped to get it up and running in time to help you send your Valentine a delicious chocolate treat. And, we’re happy to announce that we did. If you’d like your order to arrive by February 14th, please order by this Saturday, February 9th.

Also, we’ll be out at the Mission Community Market this Thursday, celebrating Valentine’s a little early ourselves. We’d love to be there every week, but we need to increase our production before we have the bars to sell. But, we’ll be there this Thursday, February 7th, from 4 PM – 8 PM, on Bartlett Street and 22nd Street. Come say hello!

By now you’ve heard of bean-to-bar chocolate, but have you heard of bar-to-bean? Our friend Ryan at Cat Trick Films made us an awesome and quirky video for our opening. Check out how chocolate bars are (un-)made:

We thought we were done with our temperer problems when we fixed the compressor thermal overload protector near the end of December. Boy were we wrong. The tempering machine, a Selmi Top, worked for all of two and half days before it stopped pumping chocolate out of its top nozzle. At first, we thought maybe there was just a chocolate blockage in some of its internal pipes, so we tried disassembling the machine a bit and cleaning everything out. Unfortunately, that didn’t resolve the problem and we had to start using our smaller, back up tempering machine which really hurt our production.

After verifying a few simple things (no blockage, motor spinning the right direction), we disassembled the machine a bit more and looked more close at the different parts. Here’s the auger (thank you, Archimedes!) that drives the chocolate up the column and, ultimately, out of the nozzle:

We couldn’t see anything obviously wrong with the auger and we were starting to get pretty confused. That’s when we noticed some suspicious marks near the bottom but we weren’t sure what they meant:

Fortunately, we’d been talking with Sean at Tomric (the US representative for Selmi) and he was hugely helpful. He forwarded our pictures on to Italy where one of Selmi’s engineer recognized those marks as a broken weld. Apparently, the screw is held to the center shaft by a single weld and that weld had broken, allowing the shaft to spin without turning the screw. We quickly found our way to Kevin at Standard Metal Products and he got the auger repaired quickly. After a thorough cleaning and popping it back into the machine, the chocolate was flowing again:

Since we had to use our less efficient machine for a week or two, we’ve fallen behind so now we just need to play a little catch up and make a lot of chocolate!

Happy holidays from all of us at Dandelion Chocolate! Thanks for making this an awesome year. We’re humbled to be a part of this amazing community; the support we’ve gotten from our new friends, neighbors, volunteers, fellow chocolate makers, chocolatiers, and chocolate tasters has been overwhelming. We can’t wait to see what 2013 has in store!

We’ll be closed for some much needed rest and will see you all next year. As we’ve sold out of our very last bars, we will reopen the factory the second week in January once we’ve had time to replenish our stock. And look for the cafe soon!

December and tempering problems always seem to go together and this year is no different. Things had been going really well until last week when our Selmi Top tempering machine started cooling a lot less effectively. It still worked just enough to temper the chocolate but it made everything so much less efficient, just what we needed for the holiday rush. After demonstrating that the compressor would come on but not stay on and that the machine had plenty of liquid coolant, we narrowed the problem down to low refrigerant, a broken compressor, or some control problem (a circuit not supplying power to the compressor when it should). While we wear many hats as chocolate makers, a refrigeration specialist isn’t one of them. After most refrigeration people told us they only worked on specific brands of appliances, we got in touch with Ceasar at KC Refrigeration. He was able to come out the next day and he quickly got to work diagnosing the problem. After about 45 minutes, he found the culprit: a failed compressor thermal overload protector:

Not only was the part cheap ($3!), but he had a spare with him! After swapping the bad one for a new one, the compressor was able to stay on and the machine was fixed! We feel pretty lucky that it wasn’t the compressor (expensive and time consuming to replace) or something wrong with the machine’s circuit board (even more expensive and time consuming to replace). Now we can get back to making more chocolate!

Our production space in the Dogpatch was right above Almanac Beer. I’m so glad we discovered this in time to partner up this winter. They recently brewed a Biere de Chocolat using our cocoa nibs and it’s delicious! It’s available now as a draft, with bottles coming in the new year. I was lucky enough to taste a sample earlier this week and I’m hooked.

Almanac worked with our Ambanja, Madagascar and Rio Caribe, Venezuela nibs to produce this seasonal beer. They took great care to get to know the flavor of our beans and to showcase them in the final product. I can taste the fruity, chocolatey, and rich flavor notes I know and love in our bars. The team at Almanac wrote up an awesome description of the layered flavors:

“Working with the unique flavors of Dandelion’s single-source beans, we created this decadent beer by layering in smoked and dark-roasted malts with citrusy Ivanhoe hops from Clearlake, CA. Finally, we added a blend of hand-roasted cocoa beans sourced from Madagascar and Río Caribe, Venezuela. The Madagascar beans add bright berry-cocoa flavors, while the Río Caribe adds dark chocolate and bourbon notes. A touch of vanilla rounds out the supporting flavors to create an eminently drinkable beer that is a chocolate lover’s beer through and through.”

I’m ready for another taste. For now, you can learn more about Biere de Chocolat here. Enjoy!

It seems like just the other day that we were telling you about our collaboration with 826 Valencia, a non-profit writing center founded in San Francisco that offers, among other things, free tutoring and writing workshops to students ages 6-18.

Now we’re excited to tell you about a new collaboration—this time, with McSweeney’s Publishing. McSweeney’s is an independent publishing house that was founded by author Dave Eggers, who is also the co-founder of 826 Valencia. (You can listen to Dave Eggers talk about 826 Valencia, their mission, and their connection to McSweeney’s in his 2008 TED talk.) Just like 826 Valencia, McSweeney’s is one of our neighbors in the Mission, and when they asked us to contribute to their annual holiday party, we were happy to oblige!

In celebration of new December publications by McSweeney’s, which include Lucky Peach issue 5 (a journal dedicated to food and writing), Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern issue 42 (an award-winning literary journal) and Beck’s Song Reader (Beck’s newest music album), McSweeney’s is hosting a holiday bash on Thursday, December 6 from 7-10 pm, at the Makeout Room in San Francisco.

They’ll have a live reading by author Paul Legault, whose newest collection, The Emily Dickinson Reader, was recently published by McSweeney’s. The reading will be followed by karaoke and dancing. There will be free holiday treats to enjoy, including our chocolate!

McSweeney’s has been kind enough to provide us with a limited number of complimentary tickets to the event, as well as gratis subscriptions to Lucky Peach magazine. We’ll be giving these away at our retail space with the purchase of $40 worth of chocolate starting this Friday, November 30.

Here’s the catch: You’ll get first dibs on your choice of either option (a pair of tickets or a year-long subscription to Lucky Peach) if you (1), include a copy of our 826 bundle in your purchase, or (2), casually mention to us how much you enjoy karaoke.

So whether you’re a McSweeney’s enthusiast, a Lucky Peach reader, or just a chocolate lover looking for a good time, please consider stopping by our space to get some holiday shopping done and receive some McSweeney’s goodies while you’re at it!

You can find a link to the McSweeney’s holiday party here.

In addition to our free ticket giveaway, tickets to the event can be purchased here.

For more information on all things McSweeney’s-related, please click here.