Chocolate is what we do every day.
Cacao Huasi is a working chocolate house in the heart of Puerto Viejo. Every day, cacao moves through our hands in one form or another — roasting, grinding, refining, tempering and moulding chocolate; making bars, desserts and cacao drinks; wrapping yesterday’s production; and experimenting with what to make next.
The chocolate classes happen inside this world. They aren’t a demonstration created for visitors. They’re an invitation to step into the work we’re already doing.
From cacao to chocolate
We work with cacao from our organic farm on the Costa Rican Caribbean coast, transforming it here in Puerto Viejo from bean to finished chocolate.
The process is slow and surprisingly physical. Beans are roasted, cracked and winnowed. Cacao nibs are ground into a paste, refined with other ingredients, tempered and finally moulded into bars.
Some batches become dark chocolate. Some become milk or white chocolate. Others end up in the kitchen as desserts, drinks, sauces and the chocolate treats we make at the house.
There is nearly always chocolate somewhere in the process.
What are we making?
That changes.
We make our regular bars, but some of our favourite things have come from playing with ingredients, flavours and ideas around us.
Lately that has meant white chocolate with berries and crystallized ginger, smoked cacao nibs with sea salt, vegan chocolate treats, cacao drinks for gatherings, and whatever else somebody decides might be worth trying.
Not everything becomes a permanent product. That's part of it.
Chocolate doesn't stop at the bar
Chocolate finds its way through much of Cacao Huasi.
It becomes cacao and coconut mousse in the restaurant. Hot chocolate and cacao drinks. Vegan Snickers, Twix, Almond Joy, Oreos and other house-made treats. Chocolate for tastings. And chocolate paired with rum, wine and mezcal.
Sometimes the same cacao can appear in completely different ways depending on what we're doing with it.
Taste it differently
Chocolate is much more interesting once you stop asking simply whether you like it.
Where was the cacao grown? How was it fermented and roasted? What happens when you smell it before tasting it? Why does one person find fruit while another finds nuts, flowers or spice?
Our guided tastings and pairings are ways of slowing down enough to notice.
Taste chocolate
Chocolate + rum
Chocolate + wine
Chocolate + mezcal
Make it yourself
If you really want to understand chocolate, make it.
Our hands-on chocolate class begins with cacao and follows the process through roasting, cracking and winnowing, grinding, refining, tempering and moulding.
You leave with chocolate you've made yourself — but usually with rather more questions about cacao than you arrived with.
People come to make chocolate. They leave understanding it.
Chocolate is the door. Cacao is the destination.
The longer we work with chocolate, the more our attention returns to cacao itself — the tree, the fruit, the people who grow it, its history in the Caribbean, fermentation, flavour, genetics and the extraordinary diversity hidden inside something most of us first encounter as a chocolate bar.
There is always more to learn.
And that's really what this place is about.
Come by Cacao Huasi in Puerto Viejo. Have a chocolate, watch what we're making, ask questions.
Cacao Huasi Chocolate House
Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, Limón, Costa Rica
Bean-to-bar chocolate made with Costa Rican Caribbean cacao.