Heartfelt Kona Coffee

I just had a bowl of fresh mango gathered from our farm, with our cacao (dark chocolate) nibs sprinkled over the top and it was delicious. The unsweetened chocolatey crunch combined with the sweet soft flesh of the mango was great. I’ve also tried them in créme brulée recently and that worked well. They are excellent blended into vanilla yogurt or ice cream. They are, in fact, the main ingredient in chocolate of any kind other than white chocolate which is really not chocolate.

Nibs are said to be very healthy food since they lack the sugar in a chocolate bar or candy and they are rich in fiber, antioxidants and essential minerals. They taste very chocolatey (is that a word), with just a hint of bitter, but provide a great contrast with anything sweet, especially a bowl of granola, yogurt or ice cream.

When we harvest cacao, we break the thick pod walls and scoop out the gooey seeds into a plastic container with holes in the bottom. We add baker’s yeast and stir the mess, I mean mass. Then we place the container of seeds in a warm box, heated to about 100 degrees Fahrenheit by a germination pad. The beans are stirred daily for five or six days and the temperature goes higher with fermentation to kill the plant embryo that would otherwise develop, keeping the food value in the bean, not in a root and leaf growing into a new plant. The mucous around the seed ferments and liquid drips through the holes in the box and collects beneath. When the beans are nearly dry and turn cinnamon brown, we place them in a drying tray in the Hawaii sunshine and dry them for 8 to 10 days, always covering if it rains.

Then the beans go onto a cookie sheet into a 350 degree oven for 20 to 30 minutes till our home smells like brownies baking. Alas, no brownies result from this step (at least not yet – that comes after the chocolate is made). We let the beans cool and then feed them through a manual or powered cracker (Champion Juicer) which breaks up the nibs inside the beans and the husks. The husks are blown away with a handheld hair dryer and voila, we have nibs. We swish the nibs through a steamer tray with 1/4 inch holes and the smaller nibs fall through.

We grind the bigger ones in a coffee grinder to be used for making chocolate. You can make your own chocolate by putting the ground nibs in a melanger (electric stone-grinding device) with white sugar (not powdered sugar which has some corn starch in it) and 5% cocoa butter and grinding it for 10 to 12 hours. As the grinding eventually reduces the nibs and additives to a liquid, you end up with warm (122 degrees F) liquid chocolate to temper and then mold into your favorite chocolate product. It’s a time consuming but very fun process.

Without the melanger, you could still make chocolate at home with a bag of nibs, mortar and pestle, and sugar, but you have to be prepared to hand crush the nibs and sugar long enough to achieve a thorough mix. This could be fun if you have help and/or really strong hands. The resulting chocolate will be granular tasting without the smooth mouthfeel of commercial chocolate but it is still CHOCOLATE.

Admittedly, our nibs are more expensive than some commercially sold nibs. Ours are estate-grown nibs, all grown on our Kona coffee farm, hand-picked, carefully processed, cleaned and packaged. Most chocolate and nibs are made from cacao beans grown in various tropical parts of the world and shipped for use to chocolatiers to process. That leaves many steps in the process to many farmhands and transport agents, some of which may not as quality-conscious as we are (we’ve seen goats wandering through sun-drying nibs in some places). They tend to produce mass quantities, using machines when possible to do the work. We do most of it by hand with great care to keep everything in the process clean and exact. And if we are careful we maybe earn about $10 an hour for our time. This is no get-rich scheme, but it’s good outdoor work and we love it. And we love to share our products with people who appreciate the taste of a good cup of coffee or hot chocolate or MOCHA!!!!

Try our Kona nibs. You may love them too. They’re chocolatey!

Order here! (And a reminder: coffee from last year’s harvest is currently sold out. New harvest Heartfelt Kona Coffee is available after October 1, 2023.