I love sharing chocolate with people at the shop.
I don’t get to do as many tastings with customers as I used to. As Ranger has grown and we’ve moved into the new facility, my time gets divided up in more directions than I’d sometimes prefer.
So I’m really looking forward to Sunday.
As part of the Portland Craft Chocolate Festival, I’m hosting two small Bean to Bar cacao and chocolate tastings. I’ve been working on putting together something that breaks chocolate down to its core — starting with the cacao bean and working our way all the way to the finished bar.
I think tasting chocolate this way is one of the best ways to understand what we actually do.
Most of us know chocolate in its finished form. You unwrap a bar, break off a piece, and that’s chocolate.
But that’s the very end of a much longer story.
I want people to see and taste cacao in the form that we receive it from the farms, and then experience some of the different forms it takes as we turn that cacao into the finished chocolate we all know and love.
Bean. Nib. Chocolate along the way. Finished bar.
There’s a remarkable amount of transformation packed into that little piece of chocolate.
And after all these years of making it, I still love sharing that with people.
I’m looking forward to getting back around the tasting table this weekend.
— George
Founder, Ranger Chocolate Co.