Rabot Estate - Cocoa Growing

The same tree will have tiny white and pink blossoms next to rugby ball sized ripe pods – always amazing to see.

Only about 5% of the hundreds of flowers will achieve pollination – leading, five to six months later, to beautifully coloured cocoa pods ready for harvesting.

Pods hang directly from the trunk of the tree as well as from branches. The colours range from deep crimson, through all the shades of ochre and gold, to vibrant greens.

Long-staffed picking poles with cutters at the end are used to cleanly cut the ripe pods from the tree. It is important to keep the cocoa estate grounds well weeded so the fallen pods can be seen and all collected.

The pods need to be left to mature for 3 – 5 days after picking, this is believed to enhance the taste. Around the estate dramatic piles of multi-coloured pods are a feast for the eyes.

With real skill, the pods are split open with cutlasses (machetes) then the beans and their surrounding pulp are pulled out into waiting buckets. The empty pods are put to good use – they are rotted down into organic fertiliser to spread around young trees.

The buckets of beans are poured into wooden fermentation boxes and covered with banana leaves to begin the fermentation stage. The natural sugars in the pulp create a chemical reaction which generates heat and alcohol. The beans are turned every other day, to ensure an even fermentation, using only wooden shovels as metal would spoil the flavour development. At Rabot we monitor the temperature constantly to ensure the fermentation is thorough and even.

The smell in a fermentation shed is one you never forget – like oak and balsamic vinegar. If you push your hand into the fermenting beans, the heat generated will astound you (approx: 45 c). The reason for fermenting is to stop the cocoa bean from germinating and to develop the chocolaty taste through a special chemical reaction called the ‘maillard’ reaction.

After approximately 7 days of fermenting, the sticky brown beans are turned out onto drying trays to gently burn off the moisture and make the beans stable. At Rabot and elsewhere in the West Indies, special telescopic trays are used as you can never tell when the next tropical shower is coming! It is essential to keep rain off as a mouldy taste will develop.

At Rabot, the moisture level is scientifically measured so the beans are not over-dried and burned or under-dried which can lead to mould growing during the Atlantic crossing.

It is at these crucial early stages that the flavour notes are developed so we exercise great care here. There is even a best time of the day to dry the beans!

At the end of these stages, the beans are a gorgeous mahogany colour, all the stickiness of the fermentation stage has been dried off and they smell wonderful. It is a sensory pleasure to scoop them up in your hands and rub them gently together to release their aroma. They taste bitter but the key chocolaty flavours are there.

Finally they are packed into breathable hessian or jute bags and stitched closed.