Sorting, grading and shipping
The months between a dried bean and a factory. Grading decides what a farmer is paid, and storage decides whether the crop survives the journey.
Dried beans are sorted to remove flat, broken, germinated and mouldy beans and foreign matter, graded by size and by defect count, bagged and shipped. For most of the world's cacao this involves a chain of intermediaries between farm and exporter.
Two things here matter to the finished chocolate. Grading is where quality is priced: a cut test on a sample determines the proportion of properly fermented beans, and that determines the grade and the price. It is the mechanism by which fermentation care does or does not get rewarded, and where the mechanism is weak — as it has been in much of Indonesia — farmers rationally stop fermenting.
The second is storage. Cacao is hygroscopic and will reabsorb moisture; a bean stored above about eight per cent moisture moulds, and mould produces musty flavours that no downstream process removes. Shipping in a container across the tropics with condensation cycling is a real risk, and it is why beans are shipped at a lower moisture content than they can safely sit at.
What it does
Removes defective beans and foreign matter, assigns a grade by cut test and size, and moves the crop to the manufacturer without it reabsorbing moisture.
Why it matters
Grading is the price signal that rewards or fails to reward good fermentation, and storage failures produce musty off-flavours that survive every subsequent step.
- Typical duration
- 14–120 days
- Why the range is wide
- The duration is dominated by logistics rather than by any technical requirement. Beans have been known to sit in warehouses for months, and that is a quality risk rather than an ageing benefit.
When it goes wrong
Moisture reabsorption in storage or transit, producing mould and musty flavours; and infestation, which is a real problem in warm humid warehousing.
The cut test
A sample of beans is cut lengthways and the cut faces are inspected. Fully fermented beans are brown and show a fissured internal structure; under-fermented ones are slaty purple; mouldy and germinated beans are visually distinct. Counting them across a fixed sample gives a defect percentage that determines the grade. It is a simple, cheap and remarkably informative test, and it is the closest thing the trade has to a universal quality measure.
Related
Flavour developed here
- EarthyMoisture reabsorbed in storage or transit produces mould, and musty notes survive every subsequent step.
- MustyThis stage is where the note is created, amplified or destroyed. Mould. A storage and drying fault, and one of the few chocolate defects that is genuinely unrecoverable at every subsequent stage.
Sources
- ChocolateHQ editorial synthesis — ChocolateHQ(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)
- Chocolate Science and Technology — Wiley-Blackwell(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)