Whiskey and chocolate — two of our favorite things are coming together this Friday at a workshop inside our San Francisco store. Fullosophie is helping us throw a delicious whiskey & chocolate pairing event with Women & Whiskies and Dandelion Chocolate. The event is already sold out, but you can still join the waitlist. In the meantime, don’t miss learning more about local chocolate maker Dandelion Chocolate in the interview below.
We hope to see you this Friday, March 25 at our San Francisco store (722 Montgomery St. San Francisco, California). Or stay tuned for the next workshop!
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Mixing melted chocolate inside the Dandelion Chocolate factory.
Dandelion Chocolate is located 20 minutes from our SF store and has been around since 2010. We love how detailed they are on their website where they share their entire process — everything from where they source their cocoa beans to how their chocolate gets turned into bars. Be sure to read what they had to say when we asked them a few questions of our own.
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Every chocolate bar is wrapped by hand.
How many people do you employ?
70
What is the most unexpected part of your production process for making your chocolate bars?
I think the fact that so much of our process is slow and hands on — like sorting all of our beans by hand to filter out cracked, moldy, or germinated beans, or wrapping each bar in foil by hand, is unusual. We’re slowly working on mechanizing some of these things to be more efficient, but until those machines can prove to be as thorough and reliable as humans, we’ll be sticking with our hands.
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Stacks of chocolate wrapped in gold foil, just before the label is added.
What are your favorite chocolate bars that you offer and why?
We choose to make chocolate from cocoa beans that have strong, distinctive flavors, which means a lot of us (and our customers) have strong opinions about them. But there are no favorites, because we’re all different. We don’t count on everyone liking all of our bars. Instead, we try to highlight what cocoa beans from different places taste like naturally, which tends to inspire stronger feelings of like and dislike. View all offerings, here.
Read more about the workshop in our interview with Women & Whiskies, here.