From Bean To Bar - Black Mountain Chocolate

Black Mountain Chocolate Factory.

If you like chocolate, which I do!  If you especially like dark chocolate, which is my favorite!  You’re going to love this chocolate factory tour.

We made our reservations on line ($ 5 each) and headed to Winston-Salem to Black Mountain Chocolate.  You never know what you’re going to find when you arrive for a factory tour.  I will say that driving through downtown Winston-Salem, North Carolina on a Saturday in a Ford F350 was not very enjoyable!  The streets are narrow, and the traffic was terrible.

The factory tour was worth the drive!  This is a very small operation.  They make about 80 pounds of chocolate at a time.

It was obvious our guide had worked all the different stages of making chocolate - she knew her stuff!  There were 6 other people on this tour.

This is a cacao pod. 

Cacao pod.  The chocolate beans are inside.

At Black Mountain Chocolate they are proud to be a “bean to bar” company.  The cacao beans come from a certified fair trade and organic cacao plantation in the Dominican Republic.

The bags of cacao (chocolate) beans are opened and hand-picked of debris. 

The next step is to roast the beans in this machine.

After roasting, the beans have a husk that is cleaned off.  The beans come out one side and the husks are vacuumed into a large bag.

We were handed a roasted bean and told to smash it in our hand.

Roasted cacao bean.

The smashed bean pieces are called nibs.  We tasted our nibs.  They were strong and a little bitter.

Making nibs.

At this point in our tour we were going into the part of the factory where the chocolate is turned into chocolate bars. 

Nobody looks good in a hairnet!

This tour was very interesting.  It’s such a small factory that only one machine was used for each step in the chocolate making process.

Sugar and cocoa butter are added to the nibs and turned in this machine for 24 hours to make liquid chocolate.

Making liquid chocolate.

The chocolate is then moved to the tempering machines.  They only make two kinds of chocolate here - Dark chocolate and milk chocolate.  Goats milk is added to the milk chocolate.

There are two tempering machines - one for dark chocolate and one for milk chocolate

This is the dark chocolate being stirred 

and kept at a constant temperature.

Our guide had started cooling down the milk chocolate so that we could see the chocolate bar making process.

Milk chocolate is a lot lighter than dark chocolate.

Each tray holds 3 molds.  The tempering machines portion the chocolate into the molds.

Pouring the chocolate into the molds.

The trays are then set to vibrate to get any air bubbles out and to completely fill the mold.

Vibrating the molds.

The chocolate cools on these racks.

Cooling racks.

The bars are ready to be unmolded.

Three perfect chocolate bars. 

The bars are hand packaged and heat sealed in cellophane wrappers.

Each bar is put into a cellophane sleeve.

After the tour we tasted the five different flavors.

Each flavor has its own cute picture on the outer package.

Of course, we bought stuff!

These giant dark chocolate chunk cookies didn’t make it home.  They were wonderful!

We also bought chocolate cheesecake, two different bar flavors and drinking chocolate, which is chunks of chocolate that will be stirred into warm milk.

If they had souvenir magnets, I would have bought one.  This tour is magnet worthy!