Alex the Chocolate Alchemist

Alex and an old chocolate roaster

Taza Chocolate is to regular chocolate what a nutty seven-grain bread is to white bread. It has a slightly grainy texture, depth, and a certain hint of fruitiness.

I think of Alex Whitmore, the driving force behind Taza, as a chocolate alchemist. He never set out to be a chocolatemaker, though. Alex got his degree in anthropology in 1999. Rather than work for a dot-com like many classmates, he worked as a yacht captain, sailing Walter Cronkite's 60-foot sailboat up and down the East Coast. Later, he moved to Portland, Oregon, where he waited on tables. That’s where he hit rock bottom – not knowing what to do with himself

I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. I was living with college buddies. I was totally depressed. The gray and rain of the winters destroyed me.

Alex became a licensed sky diver, earning money stuffing parachutes into packs. Then it was back to Boston, where he managed a fleet of cars for ZipCar. Then he briefly lived in Chile, where he taught English and rode for a semi-professional bike racing team.

Along the way, he developed a side interest in the anthropology of food. He started cooking and baking, then began working with chocolate. First he fiddled with truffles; much later, he wondered about making chocolate from scratch. Ultimately, Alex took a trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, with the idea of bringing back ideas that could be part of a new business. That’s where he saw the traditional way Oaxacans grind up cacao in stone grinders called molinaros.

People were consuming chocolate as a food ritual. They were milling chocolate in the streets and serving it as hot chocolate. It was amazing stuff....That’s where I decided we were going to make stone ground chocolate products.

A selection of Alex's products

Alex became a kind of chocolate mad scientist—fiddling with ancient confectioner machinery, trying different methods, temperatures, and timings. Chocolate is a tricky thing to make from scratch. The origin of the cacao beans, the fermentation process, how they are roasted, ground, and tempered all have multiple variables that can push the flavor and texture in different ways. Now Taza, which has a heavy regional following in Massachusetts, sells coast to coast. What jazzes Alex are the strong reactions his confections evoke.

People love it or hate it, we don’t get much in between, which is great....There are complete fanatics who have to order the freshest bars we have in stock; then we also get people who call up and complain that there must be something wrong with the chocolate because they’re not expecting the stone ground feel.

Some thoughts

• Sudden, dramatic changes: Alex kept making extreme changes one after the other, in search something that worked for him. But the interest he ended up with evolved slowly over time.
• Every experience matters sooner or later, you just don’t know how yet: I’m sure Alex didn’t have any master plan. But a huge variety of his experiences turned out to be really valuable in what he does now, from anthropology to ZipCar. If you’ve repaired equipment on a yacht out at sea, dealing with the foibles of a second-hand chocolate roaster isn’t so intimidating.

[Photo courtesy of photoree.com]