Saturday, September 20, 2008

we like machines part 2



The most important piece of the chocolate puzzle has arrived - the cocoa roaster. This beast roasts 50 pounds per batch at up to 125,000 BTU's. It's pretty serious piece of machinery! We had originally received it two weeks ago but it somehow got a bit mangled in transit. So it had to be sent back and repaired. Our duct guy came out yesterday and got the cool and hot air venting completed and piped out our smokestack. Finally feels like we're rolling!

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

we like machines..

After a few weeks of radio silence (could have bored you with FDA meeting blog posts but decided better of it) I'm proud to announce the production equipment is finally starting to roll in. This week our chocolate tempering machine has arrived unscathed in the delivery process. Why temper chocolate? In the tempering process the machine heats the chocolate, cools it down, then brings it back up to the melting point again. The reason for doing this is to stabilize the cocoa butter crystals so they are all uniform in size. The result is a shiny luster to the chocolate and that satisfying snap when you break off a piece. In the very near future more machinery will continue to roll in hopefully resulting in production as soon as next month!

Most of the work at our location has been completed. Our giant chalkboard (we gotta put our ideas somewhere) will be wrapped up this weekend as well as few other small projects. We'll definitely keep you posted and hopefully add some new video this weekend. Oh, I forgot to mention, we'll have our logo worked out soon as well! That means we get to do some cool stuff like: create our building sign, order some awesome hats, make t-shirts, jumpsuits, petwear...you get the idea.