The building that houses the Scharffen Berger chocolate factory dates to 1906, the year of the mammoth quake. Smartly, the factory was built soundly, surrounded on all sides by a yard-thick brick wall, so it sustained minimal damage.

Our guide passed around several plates of chocolate for us to try during chocolate class. This is a plate of 62% semisweet dark chocolate.

Here’s a plate of 70% bittersweet dark chocolate.

Here’s a bowl of cocoa nibs, which are over 99% dark chocolate, and quite bitter.

Here’s a plate of 41% milk chocolate. At Scharffen Berger, their milk chocolate is also dark chocolate. The official definition of dark chocolate in the U.S. is chocolate containing at least 35% cacao. Milk chocolate is only required to have 10% cacao to carry the label.

Here’s a table holding all the ingredients that go into chocolate, including vanilla, cocoa butter, sugar, and cacao (ranging from pulp to roasted bean to nib). Milk and nuts are later added, but not on site; the Scharffen Berger factory is nut and dairy free, for allergies’ sake. The chocolate is sent to a Napa facility, where those ingredients are added, if necessary, then packaged.

After the beans are cleaned, they are fed into this roaster, which roasts the beans for 45 minutes at a max of 300 degrees.

This is the winnower, which cracks the beans between steel rollers, separating the remains into nibs and shell. The shell and dust are vacuumed and jettisoned into a chute. Being Berkeley, a local chicken farmer picks up the waste for feed.

This is the melangeur (French for mixer) which crushes roasted nibs, 300 pounds at a time. This process transforms the nibs into “cocoa mass,” AKA cocoa butter.

The conche contains very dangerous fast-spinning paddles. This machine blends the cocoa mass with C&H, a large grain confectioner’s sugar; cocoa butter, the white fat of the bean, which tempers the chocolate; and whole vanilla beans, which cost anywhere from $50 to $700 a pound. The result is a smooth chocolatey liquid.

Here’s the new tempering machine, which crystalizes the cocoa butter into a solid, giving chocolate bars the uniform snap when you bite them.

This is the molding machine, where chocolate is piped into bar-shaped cavities in plastic molds. The molds pass through a refrigerated compartment called the tunnel, where the chocolate solidifies after 20 minutes.

After our factory tour, our guide turned us loose in the company store, but not before we were allowed to taste two more Scharffen Berger specialties. On the left are 99% cacao nibs, and on the right are chunks of 62% semisweet spiked with crushed Peet’s Sumatran coffee beans. [FYI: Peet’s Coffee & Tea is an inexplicably famous Berkeley institution that’s spreading.]

The case held items that could only be found at the factory store, including hand-crafted chocolates filled with crushed mint leaf, sea salt caramel, and star anise. There were also pates de fruits in flavors like fig, pear, and bilberry, which is a cousin of the blueberry.

Here’s the other half of the case, holding chocolates filled with Yunnan tea, spiced praline, and fresh lemon, among other flavors.

This packet features three chocolates and three pates de fruits. The chocolates: Yunnan tea, fresh lemon, and mint leaf. The pates: fig, pear, and bilberry. The chocolates were distinctive and interesting. The pates convinced me Scharffen Berger has a wider range than just chocolate.

Being a fig-fiend, I had to get a box of California black mission figs dipped in 70% bittersweet chocolate.

Here are three of our purchases.

Who can resist house-made brownies and chocolate chip cookies made with Scharffen Berger chocolate? If you can, I don’t want to know you. This brownie was very rich, but very tasty, studded with walnuts. The cookie was thin and crispy, with massive chunks of dark chocolate.

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This entry is filed under California, Candy Store, Northern California.