“Buy a man a beer and he’ll waste an hour, teach him to brew and he’ll waste a lifetime"- Bob Stoddard

I’m often thinking of beer, how delicious it is...What my favorite type of beer is, why I like that type. What would I brew if I could make one beer and have to drink it forever? I almost always come up with the same answer. Why limit your options? I toyed with the notion of becoming a certified beer judge (yes, such a thing exists), unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to take the class. The whole process takes about two months of classes and a large amount of studying (reading about the beers while sampling them). Perhaps in the future, but not now…

What I’ve been doing in the meantime until I’m rich and famous--or at least financially able to fund my own brewery--is working on perfecting my own recipes. The most recent one I’m working on is a stout that incorporates our cocoa nibs from Ghana and coffee that I roasted. The result was a very deep, rich, full-bodied stout with a phenomenal aroma & flavor. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite what I was shooting for. I think next time I will increase the amount of nibs and lessen some of the other ingredients, as some components overpowered each other and it became somewhat muddled. One thing I got from the whole experience is a new hobby: coffee roasting. I’ve really gotten quite interested in the whole experience--the differences in the varieties, the flavors from different roast--all quite enjoyable (although I have over-caffeinated myself on more than on instance!).

I’ve been busy sharing the TCHO love. Our Beta Tasting Event dog and pony show includes me, fellow TCHOcociates, a couple of signs, and two plates of chocolate.

For each event, Timothy and Zohara create two slightly different recipes of Chocolatey and properly mark one “A” and one “B.” People taste 5g of each and vote on their favorite and give us super helpful and often funny feedback like “A is the chocolate I want before meds and B is for after.”

We’ve been busy:

Entertainment Gathering : Louis, Timothy, and I were in LA for the EG extravaganza at the Getty. Timothy formally announced the start of our Beta program, we conducted a tasting, and we gave out coupons. Herbie Hancock was the first to redeem his - number one online order!

Electronic Frontier Foundation(EFF) MacWorld Party: We tipped our hats to MacWorld and EFF at 111 Minna. Even Herbie was there!

WIRED 15th Anniversary Party: Louis celebrated his past and present.

Death by Chocolate: Copia invited us to share TCHO with serious enthusiasts.

EFF Pioneer Awards: TCHO celebrates pioneers. We sponsored the San Diego event and Amy and I conducted a tasting.

Zen Center - The Most Important Thing: An evening at Greens honoring Alice Waters was an honor for us to attend.

TED at Tribeca: Our friends at TED wanted to introduce us to their friends at Tribeca.

Maker Faire: Make featured us in their magazine and set us up with a booth at the Faire.

Entrepreneurs’ Organization: Louis shared his entrepreneurial insight and chocolate.

Exploratorium - 31st Annual Awards Dinner: Our future neighbors invited us to share chocolate at the festive event.

Laughing Squid - Lucky 13 Party: Celebrating art, culture, technology and chocolate.

So we’ve been busy. More to come: Best of the Bay, Taste3, Yelp Chicago: Taste of Yelp, UX Week

Here at TCHO, everyone is a blogger, but not everyone knows “blogging,” nor are we all tech wizards or HTML jockeys.  We’re a bunch of people who are passionate about chocolate and sharing it with the world.  To this end, I needed to find good blog-entry software.  Since we are basically a 100% Mac shop, I needed to find something elegant, OS X-compatible, and that works with Movable Type (MT).  Surprisingly, there’s not that much out there.  First I tried Ecto and Scribefire (Firefox plug-in), then read about and was intrigued by Blogo, especially the look and feel, and its utter simplicity.

So I went to their site and downloaded the 21-day trial.  Unfortunately, I found that it didn’t support MT!  I got in touch with them and they linked me to a beta version they were working on that does support MT.  After some trial and error and backing and forthing, I can now say that Blogo is working perfectly with MT (also currently a beta version), and I will be trading some chocolate for a few licenses!  :) Thanks Benjamin Jackson, Owner/Technical Director of Brainjuice, LLC, and enjoy your chocolate!  We are enjoying your software!

Plus, who could resist the cute bespecaled bunny?  Or the straw out of the brain?  C’mon!

Words like sustainable, negative footprint and organic have become commonplace measurements of how “green” a company is. New companies are building them into their company architecture and old companies are doing their best to catch onto this “wave.” In our world, technology plays an important role in achieving this “modern” approach.

I recently spent some time in Australia’s Northern Territory - deep in the Aborigine tribal lands. I was there during their “cool but humid” season which follows 7 months of rain including the “knock ‘em down storm” season. Slowing down enough to watch, listen and learn how they care for their lands and how, in turn, their lands care for them brought Helena Norberg-Hodge’s words to life:

“It may seem absurd to believe that a “primitive” culture . . . has anything to teach our industrialized society. But our search for a future that works keeps spiraling back to an ancient connection between ourselves and the earth, an interconnectedness that ancient cultures have never abandoned.” -Helena Norberg-Hodge

During the “cool but humid” season, I watched as the Aborigines burned off the old grasses to encourage new growth and the resulting animals that will forage on it. They burned in a checkerboard pattern, one year the black squares, the next year, the white squares. This method allows for two things: the fires will burn themselves out because they will run out of fuel and the animals will have a safe place to retreat. I learned about a young boy being seriously punished for hunting and killing an animal during a season when he should have been nurturing it. I learned how to forage for and enjoy a bush tucker lunch and how to return part of everything to the land.

When we talk about our TCHOSource™ program, people often think that we are going to teach the farmers how to provide us with better beans, thereby allowing them to get a better price and improve their incomes. The reality is that our TCHOSource™ program has much to teach us as we have much to learn from our cacao farmers. We know what we need to make great chocolate and have some ideas on how the farmers can help us accomplish that through the use of technology. But, the farmers know the land and if we listen, can teach us things about how to accomplish what we need by nurturing and caring for it. We are forming partnerships and together, we are trying to improve each other’s lives and make the world a better place.

When you choose a chocolate bar, do you know how it will taste? Choosing by cacao percentages can be misleading as all cacao beans differ in bitterness and require various levels of sugar to balance out taste. Chocolate makers maintain lower percentages by adding sugar and higher percentages by adding cocoa butter; hence two 70% cacao bars can have very different ratios of solids to cacao butter and taste very different. Similarly, choosing your chocolate based on single origin can be arbitrary; a single country produces multiple flavored beans due to varying plant genetics, microclimate or soil conditions, or fermentation.

We’ve created a new way to choose and taste chocolate.

It’s all about flavor. Cacao beans are an agricultural product, just as grapes are, and the conditions in which they grow directly affect their flavor—much like wine. Instead of focusing on percentages, varietals, and origins, the TCHO Flavor Spectrum serves as our road map for scouring the world for beans with specific flavors. We find the beans and then coax out flavors you’re familiar with like Fruity and Nutty. Fruity doesn’t contain fruit and Nutty is without a nut - our recipes heighten the beans’ natural flavors.

How do we do it?  We find cacao that inherently fit into the TCHO Flavor Spectrum and then bring out the flavor with systematic fermentation, drying, roasting, refining, and conching techniques. The end product is chocolate that is consistently and identifiably Chocolatey, Fruity, Nutty, Citrus, Earthy, and Floral. And in addition to our Flavor Spectrum’s specific flavors, we combine flavors into special blends available for food manufacturers, food service, and the hospitality segments.  Discover your chocolate.