Chocolate Cordillera is made using only Colombian Criollo and Trinitario cacao beans. These beans are superior in taste to the Forestero beans found in the vast majority of chocolates. The more common and cheaper Forestero beans, grown primarily in Africa and Indonesia, produce chocolate identified mostly by bitterness, rather than by more complex tasting notes such as “fruity”, “floral”, “nutty”, etc. When tasting a range of chocolates similar in percent of total cocoa solids to the Cordillera line, the taste description would be limited to “semisweet”, “more bittersweet”, “more bitter still”, and “most bitter”. By contrast, the dark chocolates in the Cordillera range vary not just in bitterness intensity, but also in a wide range of additional flavour notes. The methods by which cacao beans are processed following harvest plays a critical role in the creation of a premium chocolate. For this reason we oversee and advise our farmers in the way cacao has to be picked, how the cacao beans have to be extracted, fermented, dried, classified and then stored.