Eight Steps From Pod to Cup
Between a pod on a tree and a cup in your hand there are eight or nine distinct operations, and each one either creates flavour, preserves it, or destroys it. Most of them happen within a few days of harvest, and most of what you taste was decided by then.
What follows alternates: the step, then what it actually does.
Step: the pod is cut and opened
Pods are cut by hand — they grow directly from the trunk and main branches, which is unusual and means machinery is largely useless. They are opened within a day or so, and the beans come out coated in a sweet white pulp.
What it does: supplies the fuel
That pulp is the entire input for the next stage. It is roughly sugar and water, and it is what the microbes will eat. Nothing about fermentation works without it, which is why beans are never washed at this point.
Timing matters here more than it appears. Pods left too long before opening begin fermenting inside, unevenly and without control.
Step: five to seven days in a box or a heap
The beans and pulp are piled into wooden boxes, banana-leaf heaps, or baskets, and turned periodically.
What it does: creates chocolate flavour from nothing
This is the step that matters most, and it proceeds as a microbial relay. Yeasts consume the pulp sugars anaerobically, producing ethanol. Lactic acid bacteria follow. Then, as the pulp drains away and air enters, acetic acid bacteria convert the ethanol to acetic acid — an exothermic reaction that drives the mass up toward 45 to 50°C.
Heat and acid together penetrate the seed and kill the embryo. That is the point of the whole exercise: a dead bean has broken cell walls, which lets enzymes reach proteins and sugars they were previously partitioned from. The products are free amino acids and reducing sugars — the precursors that roasting later turns into chocolate flavour.
Unfermented cacao contains none of this. It is bitter, astringent, and tastes nothing like chocolate, and no later step recovers it.
Step: five to ten days drying
The fermented beans are spread out — traditionally on raised wooden platforms or patios — and turned regularly until moisture drops to around seven percent.
What it does: sets the acidity and prevents mould
Drying is where a good ferment gets ruined. Too fast, and acetic acid is trapped inside the bean rather than volatilising off, producing a permanently sour cup. Too slow, and moisture stays high enough for mould, which produces musty off-flavours that are equally permanent.
Sun drying is slower and generally produces better results than mechanical drying for exactly this reason — the acid has time to leave.
Step: sorting
Beans are picked over by hand and the flat, broken, mouldy, germinated, and clumped ones are removed.
What it does: removes the faults you would otherwise taste
Unglamorous and disproportionately important. A single mouldy bean in a batch is detectable in the finished cup, and defect rates are one of the clearest differences between careful and careless production.
This is labour, not technology, and it is the step most often skipped when beans are bought in bulk from many farms at once.
Step: roasting
Heat applied to the dried beans — typically somewhere between 110 and 140°C, for anywhere from fifteen minutes to over an hour depending on the intent.
What it does: converts precursors into aroma
The Maillard reaction between those amino acids and reducing sugars generates most of the aromatic compounds you recognise as chocolate. Roasting also drives off residual acetic acid and reduces moisture further.
The trade is real. Higher and longer roasting produces more roast character and more uniformity — useful when you are blending inconsistent beans from many sources. It also destroys delicate fruit and floral notes. Ceremonial cacao is generally roasted more gently than confectionery cacao for exactly this reason: the varietal character is the product.
Step: winnowing
The roasted bean is cracked and the papery shell separated from the interior by air. What is left is nibs.
What it does: separates two different products
The shell is not waste — it brews into an infusion with genuine cacao aroma and almost no fat. The nibs are roughly half cocoa butter and are the actual raw material for everything downstream.
Step: grinding
Nibs are ground until the cell structure breaks down and the cocoa butter is released, turning a solid into a flowing liquid mass. Traditionally on a heated stone; industrially in a melangeur or ball mill.
What it does: makes paste, and sets the texture
Nothing is added. The liquid is purely the bean's own fat carrying its own solids, and cooling it gives you cacao paste — the least-processed drinkable form.
How long you grind determines particle size, and particle size determines mouthfeel. Stone grinding leaves a coarser and less uniform particle distribution than industrial refining, which is why ceremonial cacao paste has more texture than couverture and why that texture is a signature rather than a defect.
Step: what is deliberately not done
Two operations standard in confectionery are absent from ceremonial cacao, and their absence is the product.
No conching. Extended agitation at elevated temperature smooths texture and drives off volatile acids — and with them a substantial share of the aromatic compounds. Fine chocolate conches for many hours. Ceremonial paste does not, which is why it tastes sharper and more specific.
No separation. Industrial processing presses the paste to divide it into cocoa butter and cocoa powder, then recombines them in controlled ratios. Ceremonial cacao skips this entirely — the fat and the solids stay in the proportion the bean produced them in, which is the actual difference between this and cocoa powder.
Why doing all this at origin matters
The conventional chain sends wet or raw beans from many farms to a processor in another country. The variety survives that journey and the growing conditions survive it. The decisions do not.
Fermentation duration, turning frequency, drying rate, sorting rigour, roast profile — these are the largest levers on flavour, and in the conventional chain they are pulled by someone with no relationship to the specific lot and no stake in whether that farm's cacao is distinctive.
Pacha Mana's Chuncho is processed bean-to-bar at origin by the family that grows it. The practical consequence is not romance about provenance; it is that the person deciding whether to turn the ferment on day four is the person whose name is on the result.
Tasting for the process
Make a plain cup — no additions, water rather than milk, and taste at two temperatures. Then look for the process rather than for the place.
Sour or sharp beyond a pleasant brightness suggests drying was rushed and acetic acid stayed in the bean.
Flat, generically cocoa-like, no distinct notes suggests a short ferment, a heavy roast, or both.
Musty, damp cardboard is a drying or storage fault and it is the one that should not be there at any price.
Harsh, drying astringency points to under-fermentation — the precursors never fully developed.
Layered fruit that moves as the cup cools is what a good ferment, gentle roast, and minimal processing preserve. That is what you are paying for.
The pure ground Chuncho cacao is the version to taste this on, and our piece on genetics, terroir and fermentation sets out why processing outweighs the other two.
