La Cueva Chocolate Bar

During genetic testing of over 11,000 trees (...), only 6 were found to be of the ancient Nacional varietal.

The highly productive hybrids introduced later in the century were far less susceptible to such attacks, so began to slowly out-compete Nacional during the remainder of the century. By 2009, Nacional was almost extinct, but the Ecuadorean institute for agriculture and fisheries, INIAP, stepped in, not allowing this iconic Ecuadorean crop to be lost forever. During genetic testing of over 11,000 trees across the original ‘Arriba’ region, only 6 were found to be of the ancient Nacional varietal.

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.