Yes it’s sad, I’m no longer making chocolate.

BUT

Sweet Minou is a small fiction project that follows the fictional year in the life of April Sokol, mysterious chocolate maker extraordinaire.

Below is a photo gallery of my past experience as a chocolate maker. I began in my 20s by making drinking chocolate at home with my mom’s juicing machine after being able to source small amounts of cocoa beans and DIY chocolate know-how from Chocolate Alchemy in 2010, and then through unending curiosity, trial and error, and spending paychecks on small chocolate-making apparatuses and stuffing them into various small apartments, worked full-time as a chocolate maker for Cultiva Coffee.

I traveled to Haiti in 2017 for an origin trip with our cacao suppliers, Uncommon Cacao, and you can see the photos below of the operations at PISA Haiti. Farmers Bosier and Sinus welcomed us onto their land in northern Haiti, and Chiquito back on the PISA Haiti premises demonstrated how the farmers sell their wet cacao (after the pods are cracked open and the fruit-fleshed seeds (the cocoa beans) are emptied out) to PISA. Then Aline, cocoa research and development manager, and Fenise, cocoa post-harvest manager, showed us the processing of the wet cacao: first fermenting, then drying, then packing and shipping to chocolate makers the world over.

At Sweet Minou at Cultiva, we purchased these dried beans and made them into the most naturally, delicately sweet dark chocolate that was mellow like bananas.

Farmer Bosier and manager Aline stand next to a cocoa tree and smile.

Rebecca stands with two of the teenage boys who live on cocoa farms in Northern Haiti. She is holding a yellow cocoa pod freshly harvested from a nearby tree.

Farmer Sinus discusses his farming techniques while giving a tour on his farm. He is standing next to a cocoa tree.

Green cocoa pods growing directly on the trunk of a cocoa tree on a cocoa farm in Haiti.

A pile of harvested cocoa pods sits on the ground in front of a wooden shed. A white bucket sits next to the pile. This will be used to collected the cocoa beans and pulp that the farmers sell wet to the PISA company.

PISA worker Chiquito holds a bowl filled with wet cocoa beans and pulp that were recently harvested. He is showing how they measure the cocoa they buy from the farmers.

The large wooden boxes that hold the wet cacao that is fermented at least 3 days. The boxes are layered like steps.

Wet cacao fermenting in the fermentation boxes.

Fermented cacao spread out and now drying in a greenhouse-like building. Two women look over the cacao on either side of the drying table.

Eleven workers at PISA gather for a photo in the cacao storage area. They smile and hold bars of chocolate that have been made with cacao from PISA.

View of the northern Haitian countryside. There are many sloping hills covered in green, and fog hangs over the hills.

Rebecca and Jim smile and stand next to a shipment of cacao on a pallet behind Cultiva Labs. Jim points at the cacao.

Two 150 pound bags of Haitian PISA cacao in sisal bags.

Cacao roasting in the cocoa roaster at Cultiva Labs.

Cambro container with 20 quarts of winnowed, roasted cocoa nibs.

The melanger at Cultiva Labs with a heating element on top. The melanger grinds the cocoa, sugar, and cocoa butter into chocolate.

The stone rollers inside the melanger grinding cacao.

The melanger from above with chocolate grinding smoothly inside of it.

A pan of untempered chocolate melting. The fact that it is untempered makes the surface look dusty with varied crystalline patterns.

Melted, tempered chocolate being poured into a plastic Sweet Minou chocolate bar mold. Each bar is hand-poured.

Rebecca in a red apron holding a tray of chocolate bars she just made.

A finished bar of Sweet Minou dark chocolate about to be wrapped.

Based in Lincoln, NE,and ESTABLISHED in 2015, Sweet Minou Chocolate L.L.C. is Nebraska’s first bean-to-bar chocolate maker.