Tour of a Chocolate and Cocoa Manufactory, 1884
Page 2

The Roasting Room

In the factory itself, you thread your way through walls of solid chocolate which looks like red granite blocks prepared for a new building; immediately contiguous are others of similar shape and size, not unlike blocks of Portland Stone. The last are composed of the solidified fat yielded of the cocoa berry in the process of forming extract of cocoa. Flanked on either side and piled up to the ceiling are the mountains of the bags containing the cocoa as imported into this country. On the top floor of the building the process of manufacture begins; where the nuts are roasted in huge cylindrical roasters, constantly revolving over a hot fire, and each cylinder containing about a hundredweight of cocoa beans.

When cooked, the berries are cast into what is technically known as a hopper — that is, a wooden partition about six feet square, in the center of which is a hole in the slate flooring, and through which the roasted cocoa beans are constantly descending by a conduit to the floor below. Subsequently the husks are separated from the bean itself by a very ingenious through simple arrangement. The cocoa beans are made to pass between two very small rollers, which are about a quarter of an inch apart, and on the surface of each roller are small knife like projections, which break the husk but do not crush the nibs; they then pass into the winnowing machine, by the elevators, into the mills, where the beans are crushed into chocolate by, revolving drum, stone mills, or steel roller, until at length it issues, in continuous streams, a rich, fragrant, and deliciously brown liquid.

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