From pod to bar: the whole chain in order

Ripe pods are cut from the tree by hand — machines cannot judge ripeness and the trunk-borne pods damage easily. Pods are gathered and often rested for a few days, then broken open and the wet beans and pulp scooped out.

The beans go straight into fermentation, in heaps under banana leaves, in cascading wooden boxes or in baskets, for five to seven days. Then they are dried, ideally in the sun over one to two weeks, down to around 7% moisture. Everything that determines the chocolate's flavour potential has now happened.

Dried beans are graded, bagged and shipped. This is the least glamorous part of the chain and it destroys a real amount of value — beans that absorb moisture in transit go mouldy, and beans stored near anything aromatic pick it up.

The beans arrive at a factory potentially months after harvest, and are sorted to remove stones, debris and defective beans before anything else happens.

Beans are roasted, then cracked and winnowed to separate nib from shell. The nibs are ground — the friction melts the cocoa butter and the result is a fluid cocoa mass.

From here the chain forks. Pressed, the mass yields cocoa butter and a cake that becomes cocoa powder. Kept whole, it is mixed with sugar and any milk powder, refined to reduce particle size below about 20 microns, conched for hours or days, then tempered, moulded, cooled and wrapped.

Fermentation and roasting determine flavour. Refining and conching determine texture. Tempering determines appearance, snap and shelf stability.

That division is worth carrying around, because it tells you which stage to blame. A gritty bar is a refining problem; a sour bar is fermentation or roast; a dull soft bar is tempering. Almost every complaint maps cleanly onto one stage.