La Cueva Chocolate Bar

Huila

This lot of cacao was grown by smallholders surrounding the town of Altamira, in Colombia’s Huila region. The southern reaches of Huila, surrounding towns like Palestina, Pitalito and San Agustin, are famous for high quality coffee, with fields of Pink Bourbon reaching high into the mountainous terrain. Here in Altamira, just an hour or so’s drive to the north, the road winds its way into the gap between the two cordillleras of the Andes. There is coffee close by, from Altamira one can look up to the towering cordilleras on each side of the valley, but here we are surrounded by quality cacao.

La Cueva del Oso

They have built ‘La Cueva del Oso,’ a community wet mill in Altamira, with the aim of serving both coffee and cacao farmers. The method with both is very similar. They collect whole fruit in the farming communities, paying immediately on delivery and heading back to Altamira for processing. In the case of cacao, this is rather unusual. Often, central processers collect the cacao beans and sticky mucilage, already removed from the pod and beginning to ferment in tanks. In order to maintain quality, the team at La Cueva bring all of that work in house, collecting full pods and taking care of all the fermentation at the mill. They use traditional wooden boxes, and a fermentation time of around 5 days in order to break down the mucilage, creating the familiar aroma and brown colour. 

Here, this leads to a rich and complex chocolate, with notes of molasses, raisin, and bright citrus.