A raw, organic chocolate factory in the land of hipsters
From the outside, it looks like an abandoned artist’s studio. Rusty window frames and opaque panes ringed with graffiti tags prevent you from seeing what is happening inside. Yet we’re at the gates of the paradise of raw chocolate made in Brooklyn!
A delicious smell of chocolate hits you as soon as you enter, and it’s hard to know where to focus since the place at first glance doesn’t look like a chocolate shop / factory: industrial decor, weathered walls and raw concrete floors, bikes, big speakers, street art paintings, and employees wearing their finest beanies and showing off their tattoos.
The story is as cool as the neighborhood where it takes place. In 2007, a passionate financier decided to make his own chocolate in the kitchen of his loft. Convinced by his friends and family, he then began supplying local shopkeepers and delivering his homemade chocolates to them by bike. In 2012, he opened his “factory” right in the heart of Bushwick.
From these artisanal and experimental beginnings, Fine & Raw has kept a few fundamentals: working only with organic ingredients (cocoa beans, coconut sugar, fruits…) and those that are sustainably and fairly sourced. Above all, doing bean to bar, meaning the team itself transforms the cocoa beans into chocolate on site — usually chocolatiers work with ready-made chocolate pastes.
Another distinctive feature of the factory, and not a minor one, is that it mainly produces raw cacao chocolate. Hurry and read our article on the subject if you haven’t yet understood Darwin’s love for raw cacao.
The raw chocolate, “raw” in English, is made from fermented and dried beans but not roasted. As a result the properties and nutrients of the cocoa – antioxidants, magnesium, potassium, zinc… are completely preserved.
Raw chocolate also means more tryptophan and serotonin, so a better mood! Brittany, the young woman from Fine & Raw who welcomes us with a big smile is proof of that. Since we don’t have our customary hipster beanies, we put on hairnets and step through to the other side of the mirror.
From the cocoa bean to chocolate
To learn more about cacao cultivation, read our exploration in the Peruvian Amazon of a criollo cacao plantation, here.
Cocoa beans are delivered directly to the Fine & Raw Chocolate Factory. Originating from Ghana and Ecuador, they are rigorously selected from organic and fair-trade producers. Ideally, we would source criollo cacao, the finest and most aromatic variety, but the final cost of the bars would probably be higher.
Around fifteen people work in the Factory. Whether they’re working with the beans or in administration, they all know the manufacturing processes. Brittany, the head of sales and marketing who is hosting us today, previously worked by hand making chocolates and at the hot chocolate bar!
The beans are first spread out on trays and sorted by hand. Even when they come from quality plantations, transport can sometimes damage them. Some become clumped together. We only keep the best ones! Then we shell them.
They are then ground by millstones in the machine you see above. And mixed with cocoa butter! The latter is not (yet) made by Fine & Raw, which doesn’t have the machines or the space to do so. They source it from a manufacturer who also works with organic and fair-trade cocoa. The result is a thick liquid, that makes you already want to drink it straight from the machine?
This particularly fascinating movement is produced in the Selmi, the machine that kneads chocolate at a constant temperature. We add the desired amount of coconut sugar (this will change the percentage of dark chocolate) and the other chosen fruits or flavorings (vanilla, lucuma, coffee, cashews, salt…). It is then placed in the refrigerator, in large molds.
The chocolate is ready to be molded into bars or made into truffles! At that point you really start to tune everything out and find it hard to resist tasting straight from the mold…
Part of the team is in charge of dressing it in beautiful golden wrappers and other boxes illustrated by local artists. Stylized plants, Brooklyn pin-ups — we’re big fans of the different packaging, whose aesthetic evokes the factory’s \”raw\” and rough universe.
Chocolate doesn’t travel well, so we carefully select the to-go bars: an 83% raw dark and a Vanilla & Lucuma – a super Peruvian fruit that we’ll have the chance to tell you about soon! And if we had a house, we’d probably also get an eggplant emoji painting 🙂
Our visit ends here. We leave with our heads full of ideas, not without grabbing a delicious hot chocolate to go at the hot chocolate bar, to make the pleasure last on the sunny streets of Bushwick 😉
Charlotte & Quentin
