Raphio Chocolate
2019-12-01 19:38:50.041386+01 by Dan Lyke 5 comments
We went down to Fresno for Thanksgiving to visit with Charlene's family. Someone mentioned Raphio Chocolate, so we went by their unassuming strip mall presence, tasted a few chocolates, bought some, and put ourselves on the waiting list for a tour, not optimistic on Thanksgiving weekend.
We were planning on coming home yesterday afternoon, but a spot opened up on the 4:30 tour last night so we postponed the trip (making our arrival home later, and risking driving through the storm front predicted to come through), and we are super glad we did.
Raphio does small batch bean to bar processor. Their largest batch size is 100 lbs. They do single-origin bars, and some flavors in conjunction with Enzo's olive oil.
The tour was 12 of us squeezed into the 3 rooms of their little strip mall store front and facility, starting with a slide show of growing (enhanced by the fact that the patriarch of the family of the other 10 people on our tour grows chocolate in the Phillipines), passing around a dried chocolate pod and a taste of the juice from the pulp of the chocolate fruit, and progressed to tasting each of the single-origin chocolates, and then the Enzo's mixes, hot chocolate, and some other variants.
The couple that own the operation are charming, the flavors amazing, it was really cool to see the evolution of the stacked bagged bars as they spent their several months going from the roller mill to the tempering step.
And the different flavors of the different beans!