[Ads-l] bean to bar

[Benjamin Barrett]

In Van City (an endonym for Vancouver, Canada), I found East Van Roasters, a single-origin chocolatier. Instead of using a huge variety of cacao beans to produce a consistent taste from year to year, the single-origin maker tries to bring out the characteristics unique to each crop, similar to the Third Wave approach to coffee.

Today, I was talking about my find to someone who whipped out the word “bean to bar.” That term is not found on the Oxford Dictionary site.

Although Wikipedia does not have an article on “bean to bar,” it has a list of bean-to-bar chocolate manufacturers (http://bit.ly/1qznLQt <http://bit.ly/1qznLQt>) which it describes as being a house that processes cocoa beans instead of melting chocolate from another manufacturer. This definition of processing the cacao bean and producing the final product in one location is confirmed in "What is Bean-to-Bar?” by Sera (http://bit.ly/1FIhoiq).

It seems that while “bean to bar” and “single origin” are different (but not exclusive), the terms might be used interchangeably.

1. The earliest citation I find for “bean to bar” in Google Books is 1980 (Google-dated). I tried to find later dates in the book and could not.

The Amoco Motor Club guide to mini-vacations in the Mid-Atlantic
Contemporary Books
http://bit.ly/1OQDxSx <http://bit.ly/1OQDxSx>

… through every state of chocolate making, from bean to bar.

2. The next I find is 1982, which I confirmed on Amazon. Citation from the search page:

Cats, chocolate, clowns, and other amusing, interesting, and useful subjects covered by newsletters
Greg Mitchell
http://bit.ly/1WGSglt <http://bit.ly/1WGSglt>

Spotlight From Bean to Bar For those naive chocolate devotees amongst us ( myself included) who assumed that chocolate was probably made by grinding up beans from a "cocoa bush" into a powder and adding water, the 30-minute film,…

Benjamin Barrett
Formerly of Seattle, WA
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