Warm light spills from the old brick shop down a quiet laneway in Bright as the sun struggles to punch through the chill mist. The aroma of chocolate fills the still morning air as fingers of mist gently caress the surface of the Ovens River which murmurs quietly beyond the park below. The aroma comes from Bright Chocolate ‘Factory’ would be a misnomer. Think artisan studio or chocolate atelier and you get a better idea. It’s an old, unlined brick building with polished concrete floors and a storage area for the hessian sacks of dried cacao beans in the front of the shop. Inside the factory the atmosphere is enriched not by the smell of confectionary but by floral, wine-like tropical fruit aromas coming from cacao beans as they roast.
Bright Chocolate is one of a very small number of chocolate makers in Australia who practice what is called Bean to Bar production, where the entire process of making chocolate happens under the one roof. Unlike chocolatiers, who often import premade European chocolate and simply remould, Bright Chocolate starts with cocoa beans which have been fermented and dried at the plantation. Those are sorted, roasted, cracked, winnowed and conched (ground over many hours with sugar and cocoa butter), then tempered and moulded into chocolatey perfection.
The business is the brainchild of a local young couple, Simeon and Shannon Crawley, who are proud of the painstaking and gruelling effort they put into making their chocolate. ‘We are not just Chocolatiers, we are Chocolate Makers,’ says Shannon. ‘We do everything from scratch.’ The couple, who own and run a local motel, wanted to create another business working with visitors.
‘We stumbled across the idea of Bean to Bar and saw that it was a growing movement in the states and really just starting out here in Australia,’ Simeon tells Essentials. The pair researched the process and spent months sourcing the best beans from Ecuador, Madagascar, Dominican Republic and Trinidad. Working on a tight budget they commissioned the plant from scratch, acquiring good quality secondhand machinery and adapting equipment where possible. For example, Simeon designed and built the winnowing machine himself. Made of two Perspex sheets sandwiching Perspex baffles and powered by the blow function of a domestic vacuum cleaner, it separates the heavier cocoa nibs from the lighter husks by using a stream of air to blow away detritus.
‘We wanted to give people the real experience of seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting the chocolate being made,’ says Shannon. ‘I think we achieved that.’
Bright Chocolate opened in December 2013. Since then the Crawleys have gone on to win multiple awards including three gold medals at the 2015 RASV Royal Melbourne Fine Food Awards and creating the show’s Champion Chocolate Bar.
Their success and recognition has continued with chef Michael Ryan, of the Age Good Food Guide’s two-hatted Provenance Restaurant in Beechworth, using their chocolate exclusively. Another award-winning chef working with Bright Chocolate is Anthony Simone of Simone’s of Bright. During June’s Roast Collection winter food festival, organised by the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, Bright Chocolate collaborated with Simone who put on a special five-course meal incorporating chocolate in every course, using cocoa butter, cacao nibs, whole beans and the chocolate itself, and featuring a special tour of Bright Chocolate. Bright Chocolate has become a regular part of Simone’s menu.
A few doors down is Bright Brewery where brewer Ryan Tyack has made a special Stubborn Russian Imperial Stout using using Bright Chocolate’s roasted cacao nibs from the Dominican Republic and coffee beans from a local roaster in his brew. The resulting beer is dark, toasty, aromatic, sweet and very, very strong at about 16 percent alcohol. It is delicious, but best served as you would a fortified dessert wine.
The Crawleys are also excited to present a range of new cocoa-based products that are derived from the manufacture of chocolate. Shannon shows a candle in a jar made with beeswax blended with cocoa butter. When lit later back home the aroma is quite beautiful, the room filling with the dusky scent of cocoa mixed with the fine notes of vanilla. Another new product is their Cocoa Husk Tea, made with the refined husks of the roasted cocoa beans. When infused with boiling water the husks impart a lovely floral aroma and the fragrance of vanilla, making a refreshing drink that stimulates the senses.
‘With the rise of different diets, cocoa beans themselves have become very popular,’ says Shannon. Whole cocoa beans look like a large purplish coffee bean with a delicate papery skin. When chewed whole they are incredibly aromatic, releasing the aromas of banana, vanilla, tropical fruit, brandy and myriad other scents into the mouth. The finish is slightly bitter but the sweet aromas linger. Simeon points out that cocoa beans are known to contain hundreds of compounds thought to be beneficial to health such as flavonoid polyphenols, vitamins and minerals as well as traces of useful elements.
Bright Chocolate also sells cacao nibs, popular in baking and with people making authentic Mexican dishes such as mole. Another new product is its Pantry Chocolate, a high quality cooking chocolate made from blended single origin chocolates.
It is in the tasting that the time and effort invested in hand-making chocolate from scratch really shows. To begin, the entire range of chocolates are incredibly smooth on the tongue. They also feel slightly cool when a square of chocolate is placed in the mouth as the heat from the tongue is absorbed by the chocolate to melt the cocoa butter.
All the bar chocolate is single origin, meaning the beans come from one farm. Their Ecuador 72% Cacao Single Origin Chocolate, with notes of spice, honey and vanilla, uses certified organic cacao beans from the Camino Verde plantation in Balao, Ecuador. There’s a delicious citrus tang to the Madagascar 72% Single Origin Chocolate made with certified organic cocoa beans from the Sambirano Valley, Madagascar. They’re all made from the same simple, authentic ingredients: cocoa beans, cane sugar and cocoa butter.
The Dominican Republic 70% Cacao Single Origin displays the incredible diversity of aromas that can be found in cocoa beans. This chocolate has a rich earthiness: aromas of Oregon wood, coffee, tobacco and dark sour cherries. Simeon likes to compare the beans to grapes and the different qualities that different varietals bring to the final product. ‘What we do here is allow the cocoa bean’s characteristic to shine through in the final product, giving a sense of terroir, to borrow a word.’
The Crawleys have recently returned from a research trip to Fiji where they teamed up with local cocoa growers to produce beans suitable for making into chocolate in Bright. ‘It is a long-term project that could yield some very exciting results,’ says Simeon.
Then he returns to sorting through a batch of beans. He goes through them one by one, discarding any discoloured or damaged beans by hand. It is labour intensive, painstaking and bordering on obsessive. Then again, that’s the reason Bright Chocolate is recognised as being among the nation’s best.
8/3 Riverside Avenue, Bright, Victoria
Tel 03 5750 1235
www.brightchocolate.com.au
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