We made this because
nobody else would tell us

Real chocolate. Real coffee. That was the whole ask, and it turned out to be hard to buy.

Most couverture in a professional kitchen comes from a manufacturer that bought beans on the commodity market and never saw a farm. That is not a scandal. It is how the trade is built. It just means nobody in the chain can answer a simple question about where the flavor came from.

So we built the chain instead of buying from it. We own the factory and co-own the cacao company, and that is the only reason we can answer the question all the way down. Our cacao is fermented and dried in Tipitapa, Nicaragua, at Ingemann. It becomes chocolate at our factory in San Juan del Sur, on the Pacific coast. We temper it, mold it and finish it here.

Business is the tool. Cacao grown well rebuilds soil, holds forest, and pays a family more than clearing the land would. Every bar sold funds the next one.

Nothing here is an appeal. Buy the bar because it is better. The rest is why it is better.

Indulgence with purpose.

The chain

Tipitapa · San Juan del Sur · Wicker Park

Three places, one country. The farms belong to the families.

Flavor is not roasted in.
It is fermented in.

Ask anyone what makes chocolate taste like chocolate and they will say the roast. The roast is the fourth thing that matters.

At Tipitapa the wet seeds go into wooden boxes. Yeasts eat the sugar in the pulp. The pulp drains away, the temperature climbs, acids move through the seed, and the compounds that will become chocolate flavor are built inside a bean that is still alive. Get this wrong and no roaster on earth can fix it.

We take a reading on every bag at the gate: sugar, acidity, temperature. We use our own microbiology. Ingemann has developed proprietary science-backed techniques, which is why the same variety tastes the same twice.

And we run it to a target, not to a clock. The same beans can be fermented many different ways, and each way gives a different chocolate. The turns and the days decide it, so we set them for the flavor we are after.

Then we dry it
just as carefully

Fermentation makes the flavor. Drying decides how much of it survives.

The beans come out of the boxes wet and acidic. They go onto platforms and get raked by hand, over and over, so the moisture leaves slowly and evenly. Dry too fast and the acid stays trapped inside and the bar tastes sharp. Dry too slow and it molds. The rake is the whole instrument.

Like the fermentation, the drying changes with the profile we are after. Days, turns, sun or shade. Then a cut test: a bean is sliced open and read, and the color and the grain say whether the fermentation went all the way through. Every lot, before anything moves.

Two steps, both of them craft, and the second one is the one nobody talks about. This is what fine flavor cacao means when it is not a sticker. Eleven named varieties, each with its own protocol, tasted and logged before they are sold to anyone, including us.

It started
with a hostel

Casa Oro Group, on the same coast as the factory.

Before there was chocolate, there was Casa Oro, the oldest hostel in San Juan del Sur. The first Cafe Oro is still its ground floor. The hostel came with its name, and the name spread: Casa Oro Group, then Oro.

It was built on one belief: that a business can be a tool for social and environmental change. Hospitality came first, and it led to the cacao, the coffee and the chocolate.

Five places in and around San Juan del Sur: Casa Oro Eco Hostel, El Pacifico Hotel, Casa Andalucia, Nuestra Casa, Casa Ruth. More than fifty local people work there.

It is not a side business. It is the reason the chocolate works. A hotel gives a town year-round wages. It puts our own people on the ground in the place the cacao comes from. It pays for the building the factory sits in.

And it is a good town. Surf on both sides of the headland, fishing boats, and a bay that turns gold about an hour before dark. If you want to see the whole thing, you can. We will put you in one of our beds and walk you through the factory in the morning.

A thousand families,
and the company that buys from them

More than a thousand farming families grow the cacao we buy. Small farms, one at a time, across the country, not in one region.

Ingemann is a cacao and honey company. It buys their cacao, ferments it, dries it, and sells fine cacao to chocolate makers all over the world. It also buys honey from about eighty organic beekeepers in the Nicaraguan highlands. We are one of its customers. That is the part that matters: the people who decide what a farmer gets paid and the people who decide what a bar tastes like sit in the same company.

Ingemann's agronomists visit the farms, and every producer gets the training free: how to grow cacao under shade trees instead of clearing them, how to look after the soil and the water, and how to run the farm as a business. The trees grow without pesticides. Two of our varieties, O'Payo and Tuma, are organic certified.

Every lot traces back to the families who grew it.

Leave it better than how I found it.

And there is a forest

High in Peñas Blancas, at about a thousand meters, on the edge of the Bosawás Biosphere Reserve, there is a place called Reserva Los Nogales.

Bosawás is the largest biosphere reserve in Central America, and one of the largest stretches of rainforest north of the Amazon. Los Nogales is registered with the Nicaraguan environment ministry as a private wild reserve, so the forest on it is protected by law and by us. For more than fifteen years it has been turning old farmland back into forest, with a nursery on the property growing the seedlings.

It is meant to be an example. Small groups come to stay in the forest, walk it and learn it, and the stays pay for the trees to keep standing. That is what we think ecotourism should be.

And there is coffee: an experimental farm inside the reserve, grown organically and regeneratively. Some of what we pour in Chicago has come off it, and more of it will.

This is the top of the chain and the end of it at once. Land can pay for itself without being cleared. That is the whole argument.

And then it comes here

The chocolate lands in Chicago in blocks.

At the front window we melt it and bring it down and up again through a narrow band of temperature until the fat sets in one crystal form and not the other five. That is tempering. It is why a good bar is glossy, why it snaps, and why it does not turn gray on the shelf.

Then we pour the molds, cool them, knock every bar out by hand and wrap it. Everything else in the case starts from the same chocolate: bark, drinking chocolate, the confections. The syrups, the sauces and the compotes in your drink are made in this kitchen too.

The coffee is roasted in the back of the same room. Go and look. It is not a display.

People ask about the furniture. The counters, tables, shelves and floors were made for this room by MasayaCo, from Nicaraguan teak grown in sustainably managed forest. They call it seed to seat.

The coffee comes from
people we know by name

Single origin, all of it Nicaraguan, all of it roasted about twenty feet from the counter.

Some of it grows on our own farm at Los Nogales. The rest comes from growers we buy from directly, and their names are on the bags on the wall.

El Palacio has been in the Chaves family since 1894, high in the hills of Jinotega. Fernando Chaves runs it now, and his son Arturo is the fifth generation to farm it.

Cherries are picked ripe, by hand, and then processed three ways, and the choice is a flavor decision exactly like the fermentation at Tipitapa. Washed, and the cup is clean and bright. Natural, dried whole in the sun with the fruit still on, and the cup is heavy and fruity. Honey, skin off and the sweet layer left on, and it lands between the two.

Green coffee usually crosses an ocean in a burlap sack. Ours is vacuum sealed.

We roast light to medium and we keep one or two lots on at a time. Ask which farm is in the grinder. It changes.

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