The New Crop Has Arrived
In the places we buy cacao from – Central America, South America, and the Caribbean – the annual cacao harvest happens during March and April each year. That’s because “spring” is typically the dry season, and dry weather is essential for the post-harvest process: transporting cacao down long dirt roads in trucks, fermenting the beans for 5-7 days, and then air drying those beans until they have a moisture content around 5%.
Photo: Freshly-harvested cacao beans sit in a bucket in Guatemala. The white part you see is the fruit of the cacao tree. This fruit is very small relative to the "bean" which is the seed of the tree.
---
If cacao beans are dried too slowly you’ll get moldy beans. Dry cacao too quickly, and you’ll also get moldy beans: An overly fast drying process can form a “dry rind” on the bean that traps moisture inside.
As you can imagine, the post-harvest process is both an art and a science, with many opportunities for things to go sideways. For that reason, most of the cacao we buy is “centrally fermented” – meaning individual farmers sell their cacao to a central fermenteria who then handles the fermentation and drying process.
Photo: Lauren and the team at Maya Mountain Cacao in Belize check out the interior of beans which are air drying.
---
Like the farmers who grow cacao, the folks who work at these fermenterias are true experts at the craft of processing wet, freshly-harvested cacao into well-fermented beans that can become high-quality chocolate. You’ll see them walking around with gadgets to measure moisture content and performing “cut tests” on beans to assess the quality of the fermentation and drying process. This involves putting 50 beans into a guillotine which cuts them down the middle, allowing you to count the number of beans that are perfectly fermented, under fermented, over fermented, and have any defects. At the fermenterias we buy from, the standards are extremely high: they expect more than 95% of the beans to be well fermented.
The post-harvest process takes about three weeks, and then it takes about two months for dried beans to travel by boat to the East Coast of the United States before taking a truck to Bozeman. That means that we get a new crop of cacao each year in August or September. It’s one of our favorite days of the year; full of possibility and that feeling of abundance for the upcoming season, like stacking a bunch of fire wood before a long winter.
Photo: Logan moves around a 60 kg (132 pound) of cacao beans in our factory. This bag comes from northern Guatemala right near the Mexico border.
---
Just like wine, the fruit from different vintages (growing seasons) taste different from one another. Not wildly different, but different enough that we need to make subtle adjustments to our roasting profiles and house-blend based on the shifts in flavor found in a new crop.
Photo: These beans are from Lachua, Guatemala. This origin is certified organic and we find beautiful floral and herbal notes.
---
One of our favorite parts of making chocolate is helping people experience the wide variety of cacao that exists: both in terms of origins and the variability between growing seasons. In many ways, chocolate is catching up to wine in terms of celebrating both origin and vintage, and we want to help more folks experience that in 2026 and 2027 through single-origin releases and sharing our visits to farms and fermenterias we have planned.
This season our factory will be running on cacao from Belize, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Colombia. And before all you Peru fans send us emails… we are actively looking for a new Peruvian origin to bring on that has a flavor profile similar to the Ucayali and Tsirari origins you may have enjoyed from the Peruvian Amazon in year’s past. We got a guy in the Amazon helping us with that now… more to come on that front in the coming months!
We love the start of the new season.
It's so exciting to get the new beans, see what subtle shifts they have from year's past, and begin another season of making chocolate fresh from the bean here in Bozeman.
