Scharffen Berger

There were no Oompa Loompas, but...

Our friend Quinn decided that it would be fun to celebrate his birthday (today) by inviting a group of friends to join him for a tour of the Scharffen Berger chocolate factory in Berkeley. The "tour" is actually nearly an hour of talk (history of chocolate and history of Scharffen Berger), touching, smelling, and looking at cocoa beans in various states, and chocolate tasting. This is followed by a quick visit to the factory floor to see the machines.

The factory is house in a 27,000 sq. foot, not-quite-100-year-old brick building (retrofitted for earthquake safety) with arched ceilings and handsome architecture. The company moved to the present site in May, 2001. The entire building — gift shop, restrooms, tour presentation room — smells like chocolate. Wow. (I can still smell chocolate :-)

Scharffen Berger was started in 1997 by a pair of men, Robert Steinberg and John Scharffenberger. The former had recently apprenticed himself to a chocolate maker in France. The latter had a successful winery business. Together, they decided to start an "olde worlde" chocolate making company in the US (a country not known for great chocolate).

The wine-making background must come in useful. The tour guide talked about picking, blending, and tasting; she mentioned that the "nibs" (the roasted, husked beans) could taste like berry or banana or coconut.

"The secrets of our pure dark chocolate's flavor lie in careful attention to bean selection, blending, roasting, and conching, and the benefits of small-batch processing."

We were lucky enough to get to see an actual Cacao pod. It's very similar to an Acorn squash except that the seeds are much bigger, almost like a fat lima bean. The pulp is apparently sweet (we didn't get to taste) with a flavor similar to lychee.

For Scharffen Berger, the pods are collected on the cacao farms. The seeds are removed with the pulp, mixed together, and allowed to ferment. Then the mixture is air dried in the sun before being shipped to California. Here there are roasted in a giant coffee grinder, husked and broken by a "winnower", then ground by two huge granite rollers in a Melangeur, until the bits get fine enough to melt.

The room with the roaster and the winnower was covered in fine brown dust - cocoa dust! I kept expecting to see Wallace and Gromit tending the machines.

Scharffen Berger chocolate has a very high cacao content. Scharffen Berger milk chocolate has 41% cacao (compared to the USDA requirement for "dark" chocolate: 35%) and no more sugar than their 70% Bittersweet.. Scharffen Berger dark chocolates range from 62% cacao up.

"The percentages indicate by weight the combined amount of cacao bean and added cocoa butter in the chocolate. Most of the remainder is sugar (minus 1% which is vanilla and soy lecithin). For example, the 62% semisweet has less cacao and more sugar which makes it our sweetest chocolate, the 70% bittersweet is a little less sweet, and the 99% unsweetened has no sugar at all."

"Bittersweet, semisweet, and unsweetened are all types of dark chocolate. The differences among them are the varying amount of cacao and sugar which results in a more sweet or less sweet flavor. Dark chocolate basically contains only cacao, sugar, cocoa butter, and vanilla. Milk chocolate is in its own category and can contain varying amounts of cacao (usually under 25%) and sugar and includes milk products."

If you're too far from Berkeley to take the real tour, you can take the virtual factory tour at the Scharffen Berger web site.

Scharffen Berger ( in category Show & Tell , Trivial Pursuits ) - posted at Sun, 30 Oct, 19:41 Pacific | «e»