TCHO is Here!

It has been a long wait, but we finally have TCHO on our shelves!

TCHO is a local chocolate company out of San Francisco. They are free trade and doing some really great things. The following is a piece of their story:

"It’s a story of hunting down flavor itself. Sourcing beans after jolting rides by Sourcing Director John Kehoe up-country in Peru. Or personally selected by our co-founder in Ghana. Or from the plantation of a friend in Madagascar. Then cut tested, roast-tested, and melanged in hundreds more tests before a particular lot was even accepted. Then enumerable formulation trials begin, including sugar tests, to even get the earliest 0.1 Beta to put out a bar to tasters. Moving to factory production, large-scale bean batches are roasted to lab-determined profiles, then ground, refined, and conched as they are heated and cooled at specific intervals; and finally the chocolate is tempered to perfection. Behind it all: Chief Chocolate Officer Timothy Child’s genetically-blessed mouth and its over-abundance of taste buds obsessively searching for peak flavor.

1.0 is also a story of reimagining what it means to taste chocolate. The wine conventions currently used, like varietal, origin, and percentage, can be misleading — the same varietal, for example, grown on the same farm in the same growing region can taste radically different depending on the season, how the beans were fermented, or how they were dried. We suggest there’s a better way to discover your chocolate — namely the flavors that are inherent in cacao. Our flavor wheel is our attempt to make chocolate that is the purest expression of the flavors inherent in cacao, in this case, so far, “Chocolatey”, “Fruity”, “Nutty”, and “Citrus.”

"Much like our counterparts in the California wine community revolutionized the industry, TCHOSource works with farmers and cooperatives to improve fermentation and bean drying methods, which is where making good chocolate actually starts—in the field. TCHOSource also partners with leading research organizations in cacao producing countries to deploy “Flavor Labs,” allowing farmers to make small batches of chocolate with their own cacao beans to better understand the core principle of TCHO chocolate: flavor."

We are carrying their four 1.0 dark chocolate bars: Fruity, Nutty, Citrus, and Chocolatey. All four bars run around 70% Cacao. My favorite of the bunch is the Fruity.

Stop in and find out which is your favorite and help support another local company.