What bean-to-bar means, step by step

Bean-to-bar began as a plain description of how someone works, even though it can sound like a certification. The Chocolate Life reports that John Scharffenberger and Robert Steinberg introduced the term in 1996. They wanted to set their small-scale chocolate making apart from the industrial makers of the day. Bar & Cocoa, a shop that sells these bars, says there is no legal definition. The words simply mean the chocolate was made from cacao beans rather than from prepared cacao mass.

That difference gives you the useful line. A chocolatier, in Bar & Cocoa's account, melts premade chocolate to make confections. A bean-to-bar maker makes the chocolate. Size is a separate question, and The Chocolate Life also points out that many industrial-scale producers fit the description too. So the term tells you about the process and little about batch size or the result.

What happens before the beans reach the maker

Most of the early work happens near the tree, before any maker gets involved. University of Copenhagen researchers describe the fruit in a 2019 summary of their fermentation study. It is about the size of a small honey melon and holds 30 to 40 beans in an acidic, sugary pulp. The International Cocoa Organization (ICCO) says ripe pods are cut from the tree by hand. They are usually split within a week to 10 days of harvest.

Fermentation comes next, and the beans would make poor chocolate without it. ICCO describes beans piled or boxed under banana leaves, with the heat reaching 40 to 45 °C in the first 48 hours. Forastero beans take about five days. Criollo beans take two to three. The Copenhagen team explains that the microbes' by-products soak into the beans and kill the germ, so the seed can no longer sprout. Cell walls break down at the same time. That lets substances inside the bean react and start forming flavor.

Drying brings the moisture from about 60 percent down to about 7.5 percent, according to ICCO. It happens in the sun or in fired dryers, and the pace matters in both directions, since slow drying invites mold. Drying too fast leaves beans acidic and bitter.

So a lot of the final flavor is set on the farm. The Copenhagen researchers found that what cacao goes through after harvest is at least as important for quality and flavor as its genetics. Their summary says the farmer's part ends once the beans are fermented and dried. Pump Street Chocolate, a maker in Suffolk, England, says its beans usually go through both steps directly at the farm.

Sorting, roasting, cracking and winnowing

Once the sacks arrive, the maker's own steps begin, and Pump Street's published account is a clear example. Its staff spread the beans out and sort them by hand. They pull any with problems of size, color or breakage. The beans are then roasted whole on perforated metal trays. The team listens for a crack that signals the shell has come away from the bean.

Roasting sets the character of each batch through temperature and timing. The Copenhagen summary explains why it counts so much. Substances formed during fermentation and drying react with each other in the roaster, and that produces the familiar cocoa aroma.

Cracking and winnowing come after the roast at Pump Street. The roasted beans are broken open. A stream of air then carries off the lighter shells and leaves the nibs, which are the part that gets ground into chocolate. The order can vary from one maker to the next. Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco lists its sequence as roast, crack, sort, winnow, so its sorting comes later than Pump Street's.

Grinding, conching and tempering

Grinding turns nibs into a soft paste, and chocolate is built on that paste. The FDA standard of identity calls it chocolate liquor. It defines the stuff as a solid or semiplastic food made by finely grinding cacao nibs, with 50 to 60 percent cacao fat by weight. The word liquor misleads people here, because this is only ground cacao.

Recipes start to differ at this stage, which is worth knowing when you compare bars. Pump Street grinds its nibs with sugar and cocoa butter. Dandelion says it uses only cocoa beans and organic cane sugar, with no added cocoa butter, vanilla or lecithin. Both call their work bean-to-bar, so the term sets no rule about the ingredient list.

Conching follows, sometimes in the same machine. Pump Street describes it as adding air and removing volatile acids to develop and refine the flavor. Its own conche runs three to four days. It then rests the chocolate for 30 days, a choice that belongs to this maker and is not a universal step.

Tempering is the last step that changes the chocolate itself. Callebaut explains that it gets the cocoa butter into a stable crystal form. That gives a satin gloss and a hard snap. It also makes the chocolate contract as it cools, so it releases from the mold. Chocolate that is simply melted and left to cool will not be glossy, by the same account. After that the bars are molded, set and wrapped.

What to look for on a wrapper

Since the term carries no legal weight, the details around it tell you more than the phrase does. Pump Street's front label gives the country and the farm. The back gives the crop year and a batch code. A label like that lets you trace where the beans came from. The ingredient list then shows whether cocoa butter or anything else went in beside the cacao and sugar.

The words don't tell you how good the bar is. The Chocolate Life argues that high quality is not an intrinsic trait of craft chocolate. The Institute for Cacao and Chocolate Research was formerly the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute. It helped develop a sensory method for judging unroasted beans as a coarse powder. An international working group on standards treats that method as one of three consecutive checks, and the other two are tastings of chocolate liquor and finished chocolate. Its checks run at three stages, on the beans, on the liquor and on the finished chocolate.