Goodnow Farms Chocolate - 77% El Carmen, Nicaragua

This 77% multi award-winning dark chocolate bar from Goodnow Farms Chocolate is made with beans from the El Carmen, Nicaragua. The Goodnow Farms team discovered this bean after meeting Giff Laube and Jose Enrique Herrera, the owners of Cacao Bisiesto, at their farm just outside the town of Matagalpa. The beans are named after the town in and around which they’re grown, which is located in Nicaragua’s Central Highlands about an hour’s drive northeast from Matagalpa. Most cacao farms in Nicaragua are too small to generate enough volume to properly ferment the wet cacao (known as “baba”). For this reason, among others, many farmers simply dry their baba and sell it at local markets at a very low price, since unfermented beans don’t develop the flavor characteristics that we recognize as quality chocolate. Giff and Jose realized that the beans the local farmers were growing had the potential to be fine flavor beans, so they built a fermentation and drying facility on their farm and began r