12/06/2023
Hi friends! Wanted to share with you all that Josh To and I have started making micro batches of drinking chocolate! We just made our third micro batch and we want to share it with you.
Our cacao journey started 8 years while I was taking a break between jobs to visit some friends in the states. My friend shared their stash of bean to bar chocolates and tea with me and my eyes were open to the world of cacao.
Cacao is a wonderful fruit that was first cultivated and brought into culture by the ancient Olmecs, Aztecs and Mayans as a medicine, ritual and prayer to the gods. Cacao was referred to as the 'food of the gods' and was also currency for barter for many years.
Through colonization and trading we eventually got chocolate (once it is ground up and liquefied), a food that is not a need but a desire and pleasure.
We all love a bite of chocolate even though many conventional brands actually have you hooked on the sugar, textures and additives.
For about 5 years, I became obsessed with learning about the world of cacao. The true story of it. So much so like a tea practice, my cacao practice has been alongside me in my creative practice, community practice and even career for some time!
Josh and I held chocolate tastings for over 2 years to share our knowledge about cacao that we traveled to South America and Central America to farms and producers to learn about. I also ended running chocolate tastings and tours with a local tour company for several years and eventually worked briefly with a local Toronto bean to bar maker.
For many years we've wanted to be educators and experience hosts around cacao and didn't have any intentions to make it.
But as our philosophies around this food evolved from the portals of sensory and tastings to the more communal and ancestral, we started to understand that cacao was meant to be a carrier and messenger for stories.
Stories of connection and communal living and of being with one another in love and truth; something that can be really hard in our modern disconnected world.
So while we are still figuring out this part of our journey, we hope we can share it with those we know. Through a beverage we all know how to savour but is rich and abundant in character and warming and heart opening in nature.
In this batch we are asking as we enjoy the warmth of chocolate:
What is home? What is ritual?
For so many of us, movement, change and re-rooting is synonymous with life. What do our rituals look like throughout these changes? How do we honour the bonds we have to places and people around the world that we are connected to?
We hope this batch will help you in your re-rooting and grounding. Hopefully, you’ll get to enjoy it with friends and community too. This is our micro-batch #3 of drinking chocolate bars, made with care, starting from the producers in Lachuá, Guatemala, to our cacao brokers, and all the people listed below. Cacao seeds made into chocolate have come a LONG way to be shared.
We hope that we can share our hearts so that we can all connect with our own hearts within a world of disconnect.
Feel free to follow us: https://sondertaller.substack.com/
And on IG: .taller
For those in Toronto, order our third small batch here: https://forms.gle/u9vqz9v4Ff3uU4aBA
Thank you for your support and hope this finds you well!
