Step I of IX
Harvest
From October to February our pickers walk the rows with hooked knives on long poles. Only ripe pods are cut, the ones that knock hollow. The beans inside are wrapped in sweet white pulp.
40 beans in an average pod
Cocoa farm and chocolate makers · since 1962
Grown on our ridge.
Made into chocolate
in Port Harcourt.
Three generations of one family have grown cocoa on the same hillside in the Cross River uplands. Today we ferment, roast and make every bar ourselves, from the pod to the wrapper.
Lot CR 26 11 BHarvested November
The first trees
It began with forty seedlings
In 1962 Chief Ebenezer Ayuk carried forty cocoa seedlings up the ridge behind his village and planted them between the oil palms. Some of those trees still fruit today.
Bean to bar
Follow one bean from the tree to your hands
Nine steps, roughly three weeks on the estate and four days in our workshop. Scroll to walk through each one.
Step II of IX
Ferment
The beans and pulp go into wooden boxes lined with banana leaves. They warm up on their own, past 45 degrees, and are turned on day two and day four. This is where chocolate flavour begins.
6 days in banana leaf boxes
Step III of IX
Dry
Seven days on raised bamboo beds in the sun, raked by hand every hour and covered when the rain comes. Dry beans keep for a year without going mouldy.
7 percent moisture when dry
Step IV of IX
Sort
Every sack is sorted by hand. We cut test a sample of beans from each lot: a good bean is brown and cracked inside, like a little loaf of bread.
300 kg sorted by hand each week
Step V of IX
Roast
In our Port Harcourt workshop the beans are roasted in small batches. Too hot and the fruit is lost, too cool and the bitterness stays. We taste every batch.
120 degrees for about 28 minutes
Step VI of IX
Crack and winnow
The roasted beans are cracked and a fan blows the papery shells away. What is left are nibs, the pure heart of the bean.
30 percent of the weight is shell
Step VII of IX
Grind and conche
Nibs are ground between granite wheels with a little sugar for three days and nights, until the chocolate is silky and the sharp notes have softened.
72 hours in the stone melanger
Step VIII of IX
Temper
Melted to 45 degrees, cooled on marble to 27, warmed back to 31. Tempering gives a bar its shine and its clean snap.
31 degrees working temperature
Step IX of IX
Mould and wrap
Poured into moulds, cooled, then wrapped by hand in our patterned paper. Each wrapper carries the harvest lot, so you can trace your bar back to the trees.
80 g per bar, wrapped by hand
The estate today
Small enough to know every tree
120
hectares of cocoa under shade
46
grower families we buy from
3
generations of the Ayuk family
18 t
of beans a year
Example figures for this demo.
The bars
Three to start with
Every bar is 80 g, made from beans grown on the ridge or by our partner growers. Prices are examples.
Visit the estate
Walk the rows, cut a pod, taste a bar
Day tours from Tuesday to Saturday: a guided walk, lunch with the family and a tasting under the old mango tree.
- Tuesday to Saturday, 9am to 4pm
- ₦35,000 per adult, ₦15,000 per child
- Optional bus from Port Harcourt
Tasting room, Old GRA
Drinking chocolate and a flight of five
Our workshop has a small tasting room at the front. Watch the melangers turn through the glass while you taste.
We visited the estate with our children and they still talk about cutting their first pod. The Uziza bar is now my mother’s favourite.
I order couverture for our bakery every month. It melts beautifully and the flavour is unlike anything imported.
A gift that tells a story.
Boxes of four, six or nine bars, wrapped by hand with a card in your words.