Radio Silence March 6-28

If you’re reading this, chances are Anna or I gave a you a sample of our latest Panama batch, which has our web address right above “Made in Boulder, Colorado.” You might even have a few questions you’d like to ask. Let me breakdown any questions you might have about us as briefly as I can (it’s past my bedtime and I know that it’s a sin to ask for more than 2 minutes of attention for a single webpage).

Who: Anna and Robbie. At the moment the name of our brand is Chocolate Baar, which is an acronym for “By Anna And Robbie.” We have other titles that we are seriously considering but this will do for now.

What: We make chocolate from the bean to the bar, which is different than simply being a chocolatier—we are chocolate makers. We source our beans from around the world with a focus on Central and South America as well as the Caribbean.

Where: Currently, we are just experimenting on small-scale equipment with the chocolate making process at home in Boulder, Colorado.

When: Making chocolate has been a dream of ours since about June 2009. From March 6th to March 28th we will be in Costa Rica with the goal of securing a few good cacao sources. If everything goes as planned, we hope to be in full production by June, exactly a year since chocolate making was just a dream.

If you have tried our chocolate, we’d like to know what you think. If you have any questions (how to get some, about us, what we’re listening to right now), please feel free to write. While we’re in Costa Rica we’ll be away from our phones and computers, so don’t expect to hear from us until about April 1st.

Yours truly,

Anna and Robbie

Chocolate Experience #1

Chocolate has always been one of my favorite food substances the world has to offer. Whenever I look at the dessert list at a restaurant I immediately seek out the dessert the seems to be the darkest, richest chocolate confection. In fact, I’ve never been very fond of dessert and other tangent products of chocolate—to me, chocolate is the essence of what makes other desserts worth having.

When Anna and I walk home from downtown Boulder we struggle not to stop at the corner store to pick up a chocolate bar to have at home. (As of late, this hasn’t been a habit because we’re pretty well stocked with some of the finest chocolate bars from around the world.) We used to love dark chocolate bars in the 70 and 80-percent range from most companies, especially if they were cheap, like ChocoLove. However, now we’ve moved onto better quality and more expensive bars that tout complex flavors and the care of a small batch producer.

It wasn’t until March of 2009, however, that our true obsession for fine chocolate began. We took a 10-day trip to San Francisco to visit Anna’s brother Michael and his girlfriend Heather. They are what most people refer to these days as “foodies.” Part of their fine food obsession is a collection of rare chocolate bars. Each night, after a long day of bike riding and doing the things that tourists do while they’re in SF, we would all sit down with a glass of wine or port and enjoy the differences between each of the bars. That was the first time we had tried Askinosie, Republica del Cacao, Valrhona and at least a dozen others.

Here is a video of our trip to San Francisco (Unfortunately the camera wasn’t around during our chocolate intoxication sessions.)

The tasting experience we had in San Francisco was important, but it didn’t immediately inspire us to begin making chocolate of our own—that came a few months later. If chocolate is a passion of yours, then I hope that you remember one of your favorite chocolate experiences as we remember ours. If you haven’t had one of those memorable moments yet, then maybe we can change that.

Greetings

We are long overdue for a public blog but with so much happening with us and the world in the last few weeks, we figured it’s time.

So what’s this all about? What is Chocolate Baar? To begin, Chocolate Baar is an unofficial title for a project that me (Robbie) and Anna are working on. “Baar” stands for “by Anna and Robbie.” So, this blog is officially and unofficially titled, “Chocolate by Anna and Robbie.”

I’m glad you’ve found your way here. The Internet is a vast and ever-growing space so the chances of you landing here are approximately 1 in… 108 million (according to a domain count in 2007).

You can expect to find here news about our progression towards becoming one of Colorado’s first bean-to-bar chocolate manufacturers. However, let’s give credit where credit is due. Steve Devries has been making chocolate in Denver for a long time now and he is considered to be one of the most talented chocolatiers in the world (according to Chloe). I’ve never tried his chocolate but someday I hope to be that lucky… And let’s not forget to give a tip of the hat to the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory. Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that at one time or another they were making chocolate from the bean. Anyway, I’d like to believe that we are at least the first folks in Boulder, Colorado to be producing artisanal chocolate from the bean without the aid of any dirty tricks, including soy lecithin.

Choose quality over quantity: Just as we aim to make small batches of some of the finest chocolate that the world has to offer, I’m going to end this introduction now—before the word count outweighs the quality of the content.