A small chocolate workshop with a drum roaster, a tray of cracked cacao nibs and husk, a stone melanger grinding glossy liquid chocolate, and a row of freshly molded bars cooling on a marble slab

How Bean-to-Bar Chocolate Is Made: The Process Step by Step

Published 9 Sep 20264 min read

A bean-to-bar chocolate maker starts with dried, fermented cacao beans. Much of what will make them taste like a Madagascar or a Dominican or a Peru has already happened on the farm, in the fermentation box described in our cacao fermentation guide. What the maker does next is decide how much of that flavor to keep and how to turn a sack of seeds into a bar. The steps below follow the order the work comes in, with one craft workshop, Dandelion Chocolate, as the worked example, drawn from its team's own account of testing machines at Steve DeVries's chocolate factory in Denver.

Roasting

The roast comes first. In the roaster, the amino acids and sugars that fermentation created react to form the hundreds of compounds we recognize as chocolate. How hard to roast is the maker's choice, and its effects reach past flavor. Dandelion describes its own roasts as lighter than those of some other makers, and its team found that those lighter roasts leave more moisture in the beans, which makes the ground paste much thicker. After trying a pre-grinder in Denver, the team concluded that it might suit smaller batches or makers with a heavier roast, but not its own lightly roasted beans.

Cracking and winnowing

Roasted beans are cracked into pieces, and the husk is separated from the heavier fragments of kernel, the nibs, in a winnower. The radicle comes out too: the hard bit of the bean that would have become the tree's taproot, which looks like a tiny nail and is much harder to refine than the rest. Winnowing used to be slow work. Dandelion recalls that winnowing a 30-kilogram batch in under three hours was once considered highly skilled, and that even four and a half hours counted as decent. A winnower with a modified design built by two of its staff cut that to about an hour and a half per batch, most of it time the team could spend on other jobs. The machine at DeVries's workshop did all three jobs, cracking the beans, winnowing them and removing the radicles.

Grinding: the melanger

The nibs then go into a melanger with sugar. Dandelion's melangers are spinning drums with big granite wheels and granite bases that crush the nibs and sugar together. At the start, the nib and sugar particles are still large and rough. The team checks the chocolate with a micrometer to find the largest particle in a sample, and once the particles are down to 20 to 29 microns, the chocolate is poured out of the melanger, cooled and stored.

Melangers are not the only way to grind. In Denver, the team tried a three-roll refiner, which gave a mostly uniform particle size. The trade-off was labor: the refiner took a long time, needed active attention and frequent adjustment, and called for a skilled operator.

Conching

The long grind does a second job that the trade calls conching, after the shell-shaped machine Rodolphe Lindt developed in Bern in 1879, as our chocolate history guide recounts. Lindt's machine was a grinder with long, shell-shaped troughs that mixed the chocolate more evenly and drove off unpleasant aromas. Hours of warm agitation distribute the particles evenly through the cocoa butter and let volatile aromas evaporate, which smooths the chocolate. Dandelion uses its melangers for both grinding and conching, running them for a few days and tasting along the way. Dandelion's chocolate spends about three to four days in its melangers, and the team has found itself liking the taste of a batch but keeping it running to improve the texture.

A separate conche gives the maker another lever. At DeVries's workshop the team ran a longitudinal conche that held 80 pounds of chocolate. It works by moving a roller over the chocolate and squeezing it against a granite base, which rounds off particles that come out of refining somewhat jagged. The team's notes praised its velvety texture and the fact that it can be stopped at any point when the flavor is best, and also listed the downsides: it is loud, uses a lot of energy and is hard to find.

Tempering

Cocoa butter can set in six different crystal forms, and only one of them, the one tempering aims for, gives a bar its gloss and its melt-in-the-mouth texture. Bloom can appear on a bar stored too warm, which is why our chocolate storage guide recommends keeping bars cool and refrigerating them only when there is no other option, well wrapped.

The workshop, stage by stage

Stage	What it changes in the bar	From Dandelion's notes
Roasting	Turns fermentation's amino acids and sugars into chocolate flavor compounds	Lighter roasts leave more moisture in the beans and a thicker paste
Cracking and winnowing	Removes the husk and the hard radicle, leaving nibs	About an hour and a half per batch with the current winnower
Melanging	Grinds nibs and sugar together	Out of the melanger at 20 to 29 microns
Conching	Spreads particles evenly and lets volatile aromas evaporate	About three to four days in the melanger, which does both jobs
Tempering	Sets the one crystal form that gives gloss and melt	Not covered in the Denver notes

Where the flavor is decided

The farm's fermentation creates the raw material for flavor. The roast develops it. The conche smooths it. Two makers working from the same origin can roast and conche differently, which is one reason two Madagascar bars from different makers can taste different, and why our single-origin tasting guide says a bar carries the maker's choices as well as the farm's. The Denver notes show how much of that comes down to machinery as well as taste: the roast changes how the paste grinds, and the choice between a melanger, a roll refiner and a conche changes the texture. Snap a bar (shop chocolate bars), look at the shine and smell the break, and you are tasting the maker's roast, conche and temper.