Personal Change: The Role Dark Chocolate

I’m a dark chocolate guy. I like its depth, its round feel in the mouth. The sweet and slightly bitter combined. I didn’t set out to write a blog about shifts in perspective; I set out to write about chocolate. Over the past decade, there’s been an explosion of high-end artisanal chocolate-makers: people who are meticulous about getting involved in every piece of the chocolate production process – starting with close contacts with cocoa growers to machinery that lets you make chocolate in small, minutely adjusted batches. (They remind me of craft-brewed beer, only earlier in the cycle.)

My brainstorm was to explore the personalities in the world of artisanal chocolate through a sort of travel narrative. So, I talked to a lot of people and tried a lot of chocolate. What I found in almost every case was that the people who came to the world of artisanal chocolate started out doing something completely different. They were yacht captains, musicians, golf course managers, and engineers. Something just happened to each one of them on the way to wherever they were going that shifted their perspective. In future posts, I’ll tell some stories about individuals behind companies such as Taza Chocolate, Black Mountain Chocolate, and Bittersweet Café.