Our Expanded Winnowing Machine

We apologize that our blogging has been a little intermittent the past couple of months. As we’ve mentioned we’ve been tremendously busy going to chocolate shows, sourcing cacao beans and most importantly expanding our factory. We promise to update the blog much more regularly from now on.

Over the next few days I’ll put up pictures and movies of the new factory in production. We’re still expanding a portion of our factory but the main part is now making chocolate. We have quite a few new machines (not all of which we’ve finished restoring yet). We also have really streamlined our production. Our ethic here at Amano is that we always look for how we can make even better chocolate. That means we’re always on the lookout for things we can do better. Chocolate making is an art and an artisan always is improving their craft.

To start out I wanted to show some pictures of the expansions to our new winnower.

The picture above is of the expansion to our antique winnower. We’ve put a vacuum system on it to suck beans up out of our cooling table. Right now we’re scooping beans into the winnower by hand. That means someone has to stand beside the winnower with hearing protection on and continually scoop beans out of buckets until they are all crushed and winnowed. Now we can load them in minutes to a hopper where they will feed into the winnower.

We’re still working the bugs out of it. While we wish the base the winnower sits upon was as beautiful as the winnower itself we did hire some very skilled carpenters to make the hopper match the winnower. We were very pleased with the results. Eventually when we have a facility where we can offer tours in we’ll replace the scaffolding the winnower sets upon with something a little more attractive. For now we’re being a bit more pragmatic. After all, we have to start making chocolate for Christmas soon!

The blue hopper to the side of the winnower is where the chaff from the beans is collected. When we are done winnowing we drain it into large buckets. The chaff can be used for gardening, for facial scrubs or (if we have too much of it) we simply put it in the trash.

I should note that I took the above pictures while we were still putting the hoses onto the winnower. So there is still quite a bit of chaff on the walls and floor from construction.