Trees, Cocoa Beans, and Venezuela

Our good friend Tanya Beyer, who paints delicate, perfect watercolors, has written a beautiful blog post about trees, finding her way through words to the cacao trees that grow the pods that carry the beans that are harvested and, eventually, make their way to our shop in Meadowlands, Minnesota, where they are made into fine, bean-to-bar chocolate.

Photos of Venezuelan Cocoa Beans are posted on Chocolate Alchemy's Facebook Page. These photos show the places where our Venezuelan Amazonas Origin is grown and harvested. I was struck by the lavender and purplish colors of the raw beans because they are the same colors as our Amazonas chocolate as it conches away in our little grinder in our little chocolate shop in Meadowlands, Minnesota, where we coax out the flavors and turn it into something wonderful and uniquely flavored.

We feel privileged to be working with all these people and to have discovered cocoa in its truest form.