Some 20 hours after leaving Principe, the cacao arrives in Sao Tome, Arlindo do Espirito Santo who is in charge of our chocolate laboratory, is the first person to jump on board before unloading.
He checks all the bags to make sure none have broken open or got wet. It is very important to do this before offloading because if even one bag got slightly wet we need to understand why and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Only after Mr. Arlindo clears the load does the offload onto the dock start.
Bags of 30 kilos each work best for us because they pass easily from hand to hand from start to finish on the journey from Terreiro Velho to our staging area on the Nova Moca plantation without ever touching the ground.
The Nova Moca team is ready to receive the beans. One by one the bags are opened, checked, re-weighed, organised by harvest date and placed in our dehumidified storage area.
At this point, with the dried cacao beans at Nova Moca, we can easily say that 60 percent of our work is done, as we already have the essentials for an extraordinary chocolate.
Before roasting, our cacao beans are selected by hand. Empty or defective beans are removed. The beans are now clean and checked. For a uniform roasting process, we make sure that beans of similar sizes are roasted together, with the same amount of heat and time, so the beans will release their best flavour.
Roasting is, without a doubt, a risky operation, because it is during this phase that the chocolate’s aroma is developed, and where the tiniest of errors in terms of time or temperature can ruin all the work done up to now. To get the best result we need the ideal thermal curve. We need to know when to interrupt the roasting, neither a second too soon nor too late because this is when the chocolate’s aromas are developed to their fullest. From 1980 to 1995 we roasted a lot of coffee in Zaire but very little cacao. We have a lengthy and well-rounded experience with a wide range of roasting machines and many species and varieties of coffee. The cacao was another matter altogether.
When you roast coffee, a colour change is one of the parameters that tip you off as to timing. But with cacao, which must be roasted still covered in its tegument, the colour doesn’t change, so there is no tip-off.
Throughout each roasting tests we gathered a huge amount of data regarding time and temperature. Our notes filled whole binders.
A low temperature and a long roasting time "take away happiness from the cacao". If temperatures are just a little too high or the time just a moment too short it will yield a rough flavour. Little by little we got there. At first, 95 percent of our efforts were either too short or too long. But that 5 percent that were just right led us to realize that any shortcoming was due to our own fault. Most roasted cacao tastes like nuts or burnt. Thanks to the extraordinary quality of our cacao, we gradually found that "magic second" that led us to the perfect roasting down to a fraction of a second. We finally succeeded!
Cacao beans are covered by a woody tegument. Underneath lies a small film called endosperm. Inside this endosperm there is a hard and bitter wild root.
From our chocolate nibs it might seem that the next phase is very brief, but that’s not the case. Cacao is a product that is alive, that wants to be known and cared for, and that likes to remind you of this by making you pay for even a moment’s distraction. At every different point in the refining, the taste and intensity change in a non-linear manner, with continuous and diverse sensations. Refining is another risky phase. We are now close to the 100 percent perfection that we dream of, the basis of all our chocolate, 100 percent perfection from the moment the cacao is picked off the tree until it reaches you.
Chocolate 
