beans and taint them with undesirable flavors.
Once dried to about 7% moisture, the
beans are resistant to further microbial
spoilage. They’re then cleaned, bagged, and
shipped to manufacturers all over the world.
Roasting Dried fermented cacao beans are
less astringent and more flavorful than
unfermented beans, but their flavor is still
unbalanced and undeveloped, and often
dominated by vinegary acetic acid. After
selecting, sorting, and blending the dried
beans, the chocolate manufacturer roasts them
to develop their flavor. The time and
temperature vary according to whether the
beans are to be roasted whole, in their thin
shell, or as the cracked inner kernels, the nibs,
or as nibs that have been ground into small,
quickly heated particles. Whole beans take
30–60 minutes at 250–320ºF/ 120–160ºC. This
is a much gentler treatment than coffee beans
require, thanks to the abundance of reactive