The Chocolate Underground

On a quiet weeknight in Brooklyn, a rich aroma wafts through the basement of a brownstone. It’s nearly midnight and Ben Rasmussen, a 41-year-old software engineer by day, is tending carefully to a humming grinder the size of a breadbox. Inside that modest machine, crushed cacao nibs whirl into a velvety brown paste. Rasmussen, wearing a worn apron smudged with chocolate, peers in with the focused gaze of a scientist. This makeshift “chocolate lab” – complete with repurposed kitchen appliances, homemade contraptions of funnels and tubes, and bags of exotic cacao beans stacked in a corner – is the heart of his secret second life. By daylight, neighbors know him as the friendly family man heading off to a tech job. But after dusk, he transforms into an underground chocolatier, part of a growing subculture of craft chocolate makers quietly thriving in cities around the world.

An Unlikely Laboratory

Rasmussen’s journey into the world of chocolate craft began with a simple taste. Years ago, he attended a gourmet chocolate tasting in Manhattan, expecting nothing more than a fun, sugary evening. Instead, he encountered flavors he never imagined could come from pure chocolate – notes of apricot and cherry, hints of tobacco and warm spices, even a whisper of jasmine. Each bite was a revelation. “I never knew chocolate could taste this way,” he remembers thinking, as he savored one single-origin square that brimmed with fruity brightness and another that carried deep earthy tones. That eye-opening experience set his curiosity on fire. He learned that these were bean-to-bar chocolates, handcrafted in small batches by artisans who coaxed out unique flavors from specialty cacao beans. Compared to the one-dimensional candy bars of his childhood, this chocolate felt like wine – complex, expressive of its origins, and alive with possibility.

Intrigued, Rasmussen dove into research. He hunted down bars from any craft maker he could find, sampling chocolates made with beans from Madagascar, Venezuela, Colombia, and beyond. The more he tasted, the more obsessed he became. Soon he wasn’t just eating chocolate – he was hosting informal tasting parties for his friends, eager to share the wonders he’d discovered. One evening, as a group of them passed around squares and traded impressions (“I get raisins and coffee in this one!” “This one tastes like plum and smoke!”), a friend posed a fateful question: Why don’t we try making chocolate ourselves? Rasmussen let out a laugh – the idea sounded absurd. Making chocolate from scratch was something giant factories did, not regular people in a tiny Brooklyn kitchen. “I thought it was a preposterous idea,” he admits. But the notion lingered in his mind. After all, he was a tinkerer by nature and loved DIY projects. Why not at least investigate the possibility?

Within a few weeks, investigation turned into action. Rasmussen pooled a bit of savings and sourced a bag of raw cacao beans from Ecuador. He bought a small table-top grinder (the kind normally used for Indian spices and lentils) and a basic home coffee roaster. On a crisp autumn night, he invited the same friends back to witness the experiment. They roasted the cacao beans in small batches right in his kitchen, filling the air with an intoxicating toasty scent somewhere between brownies and brewed coffee. They cracked the beans open to winnow out the thin husks, then poured the coarse nibs into the grinder. To everyone’s amazement, over the next few hours those hard nibs slowly transformed into liquid chocolate. By 2 A.M., the group was pouring their very first batch of glossy dark chocolate into makeshift molds – plastic ice cube trays lightly greased to release the bars. The results were rustic and the process was messy, but Rasmussen was officially hooked. In that moment, crowded around a jerry-rigged machine and licking traces of warm chocolate off their fingers, the seeds of an underground chocolate maker were planted.

Bean-to-Bar Bootstrapping

In the broader world of confections, what Rasmussen was attempting is known as bean-to-bar chocolate making – starting with raw cacao beans and ending with finished chocolate, all in-house. For most of modern history, this was an art practiced only by large industrial manufacturers. The conventional wisdom used to be that making chocolate required prohibitively expensive equipment, technical know-how handed down over generations, and access to global supply chains of cacao. Yet here was a growing cadre of hobbyists and small entrepreneurs determined to do it on their own terms, often in homes or tiny urban workshops. By the early 2000s, this craft chocolate movement was taking root quietly, spread by word of mouth and early internet forums where a handful of fanatics traded tips on roasting techniques and repurposed machines.

John Nanci, a retired chemist turned chocolate evangelist, was one of the movement’s early mentors. In 2003, he started a blog called Chocolate Alchemy with a simple mission: to demystify the chocolate-making process for anyone crazy enough to try it at home. At the time, naysayers insisted home chocolate making was impossible – the equipment was too expensive, the beans too hard to source, the process too finicky for amateurs. Nanci proved them wrong. He experimented incessantly, finding creative hacks: for example, using economical Indian spice grinders (called melangers) to refine cocoa instead of industrial mills, or building a winnowing machine from PVC pipes and a shop-vac to separate husks from nibs. He began importing small quantities of cacao beans and selling them directly to home chocolate-makers, eliminating the supply issue. Crucially, he shared all this knowledge freely on his blog. “I make it a point to answer every question I can,” Nanci says. “We’re all doing this together. To me, there are no trade secrets.” His open-source approach cultivated a community rather than a competition, and that community rapidly expanded. By the mid-2010s, dozens of new micro-batch chocolate makers had sprung up across the U.S., from southern California to New England – many of them inspired by or directly taught through Chocolate Alchemy’s resources.

Rasmussen was one of those inspired souls. After his initial kitchen experiments in Brooklyn, he officially founded his own chocolate venture, playfully naming it after the Potomac River near where he grew up. Potomac Chocolate launched in 2010 out of the basement of his Virginia home (he later relocated to New York, bringing the hobby with him). Like many craft makers, he started on a shoestring budget. There was no shiny chocolate factory – he built one in miniature, right at home. “I had to build or re-purpose most of my machinery,” Rasmussen recalls. He scoured Craigslist for used ovens and fridges, rigged up stainless-steel bowls into roasters, and hand-built a winnower using spare parts from a hardware store. In fact, for a long time the only piece of professional chocolate equipment he owned was a tempering machine (a device to precisely cool and solidify chocolate for molding). “Even my grinder was originally meant for grinding lentils, not chocolate,” he says with a grin, patting the trusty machine in his basement lab. This bootstrapped approach kept his startup costs to just a few thousand dollars – manageable even with a mortgage and four kids to feed. By day, he continued working as a tech professional, but late each night he would descend to his home workshop and become, as friends half-jokingly nicknamed him, the Chocolate Alchemist of Brooklyn.

Rasmussen’s story is remarkable, but it’s far from unique. In city after city, similar tales abound. A lawyer in San Francisco spends her weekends roasting Nicaraguan cacao in a converted garage. A pair of former architects in Detroit now devote their creative energy to designing new flavor combinations for their small-batch chocolate bars. In Los Angeles, one of the first craft chocolate companies to emerge was started by a husband-and-wife team, David and Corey Menkes, who began with a home experiment much like Rasmussen’s. “We actually weren’t planning to make chocolate at first,” David Menkes admits. Initially the couple were interested in supporting cacao farming projects abroad; they even traveled to Guatemala to visit a cocoa cooperative. But destiny intervened in the form of a suitcase full of cocoa beans. “We brought back some cacao beans from Guatemala and started experimenting with making chocolate at home,” Menkes says. Night after night, the couple roasted beans on their patio and ran tests with small tabletop grinders. “After a year of experimenting and buying little machines, we decided to start selling our bars.” In 2014, they launched LetterPress Chocolate in Los Angeles, crafting tiny batches of bean-to-bar dark chocolate out of a cramped workshop. At the time, they were essentially a two-person operation working out of a rented space no bigger than a studio apartment. “We’re a really tiny company – it’s just my wife and me doing all the work,” Menkes explains. In the early days, they couldn’t afford an automatic molding line, so David improvised: for each batch, he literally filled every single bar mold with liquid chocolate using a hand-held syringe. It was painstaking labor – dozens upon dozens of precise squirts – but it got the job done. “Up until now, I’ve been injecting every mold by hand,” he says, wryly noting that they finally saved enough to purchase a small tempering and molding machine to ease the process. Such stories of grind and grit have become almost legendary within the craft chocolate subculture, passed around at meet-ups like folklore: the midnight chocolate pours, the Frankensteined machines held together with duct tape, the perseverance of makers who refuse to give up.

The Secret Society of Cacao

These independent chocolate makers often operate under the radar, but they are far from isolated. In fact, they’ve formed a loose but tight-knit network – an underground society of cacao craftsmen and women who find each other in person and online. In New York City, a food writer and chocolate enthusiast named Megan Giller began hosting what she dubbed an “Underground Chocolate Salon.” A few times a year, she gathers fellow chocophiles in a secret location (sometimes the back room of a specialty food shop after closing, sometimes a friend’s art studio) for evenings of tasting and conversation. Attendees bring rare bars to share or samples of their own homemade chocolate experiments. By candlelight, they savor single-origin bars and trade stories. One salon might feature a vertical tasting of a single Venezuelan cacao roasted by six different makers; another night, the group might compare notes on how a Madagascar chocolate pairs with various red wines or cheeses. “It’s like a book club for chocolate, except sometimes it turns into a full-fledged party,” Giller jokes. The vibe is convivial and a touch conspiratorial – newcomers are often invited via whisper network, and the events aren’t advertised publicly, to keep the gathering intimate (and, during the pandemic years, safely small). Similar underground tasting clubs have popped up in other cities like San Francisco and London, where craft chocolate aficionados hold informal meet-ups in homes or small co-working kitchens after hours. The goal is simple: to celebrate and geek out over craft chocolate – a passion not everyone in their daily lives might understand.

The internet, too, has been a vital meeting ground for this subculture. On forums and social media groups, makers swap advice on everything from tempering tricks to packaging suppliers. In the early days, the Chocolate Alchemy forum was the go-to hub for troubleshooting a temperamental batch or sharing excitement about a newly sourced origin of beans. Today, there are lively Reddit communities where hobbyist makers post pictures of their winnowers made from refurbished blenders, or where a struggling newbie might ask, “Help! My cocoa butter is seizing, what do I do?” and receive a dozen helpful responses within hours. Collaboration is the currency in this world – a stark contrast to the secrecy that once cloaked the chocolate industry’s processes. It’s not uncommon for a more established maker to openly share their roasting profile for a particular bean with a newcomer, or to send a bag of surplus beans to a fellow chocolatier across the country who’s curious to try them. They may be “competitors” in a market sense, but within the community there’s a prevailing sense that everyone is working together to elevate craft chocolate as a whole. As one veteran maker put it, “a rising tide lifts all boats – and we need all the help we can get to turn people on to good chocolate.”

Passion Over Profit

What drives someone to spend their nights and weekends fussing over cacao beans, for little to no financial reward? Step into any of these tiny chocolate workshops and the answer becomes clear: it’s passion, bordering on obsession. Craft chocolate is part art, part science, and wholly a labor of love. The process is famously demanding – a dance of variables that require both meticulous control and creative intuition. Makers must learn the peculiarities of each harvest of beans: one batch of Ugandan cacao might need a gentle roast to bring out its hidden notes of tart cherry; another from Papua New Guinea might demand extra refining time to tame its characteristic smoky profile. There are countless moments where things can go awry. A few degrees too hot during roasting can scorch away delicate flavors. Grind the cocoa too quickly and it might turn gritty instead of silky. And tempering – the final step of cooling the chocolate so it hardens with a shiny snap – can be heartbreakingly fickle. Many an underground chocolatier has endured the frustration of “bloom,” the dreaded white streaks or spots that appear on a chocolate bar when tempering goes wrong. It can take dozens of attempts to produce a handful of beautiful bars. And yet, these craft makers persist, fueled by the magic of transformation and the allure of creating something truly special.

“Eating your own chocolate and giving away chocolate I made myself is one of my great pleasures,” says one hobbyist chocolate maker, a former chemistry teacher who now tinkers with chocolate in his spare time. That sentiment is echoed by many in the community – the joy comes not only from mastering the craft, but from sharing the results. Most of these urban chocolate alchemists aren’t in it to get rich (and indeed, few do). They sell their bars at local farmers’ markets, indie groceries, or online in small batches, often just to cover costs and fund the next round of beans and equipment. Rasmussen recalls the first time a stranger bought one of his chocolate bars at a small gourmet shop in Washington, D.C. “I was over the moon,” he laughs. “I think I made maybe five dollars of profit on that bar, if you even count my labor. But knowing someone appreciated what I made – that was priceless.” For him and others, the positive feedback from customers and friends is a huge part of the reward. Craft chocolate bars, with their typically higher price tags (often $8 to $12 for a modest bar), tend to attract a certain adventurous kind of chocolate lover. Makers often develop a direct relationship with these fans – through social media, email newsletters, or face-to-face at events – forming a bond over a shared appreciation of fine chocolate.

These bonds can be surprisingly personal. Customers will write long emails describing how a particular bar’s flavor reminded them of childhood summers, or how they never realized chocolate could taste like citrus and rose until they tried a craft bar. Some enthusiasts become quasi-apostles, spreading the gospel of bean-to-bar to their friends. Rasmussen likes to joke that he has “chocolate groupies,” though he’s quick to clarify they’re really just passionate supporters. One loyal customer of his drives over an hour to attend each of Potomac Chocolate’s open-house tasting days, eager to hear about the latest batch and the story behind its beans. “That kind of engagement, you’d never see it with a mass-market candy bar,” Rasmussen notes. Craft chocolate seems to inspire a deeper connection, both to the product and the people behind it.

Ethics and Experimentation

Another hallmark of the chocolate underground is a shared ethos: a determination to do things differently from “Big Chocolate.” For more than a century, the chocolate industry has been dominated by giant corporations and volume-driven production, often with dire ethical compromises at origin. Most of the world’s cheap cocoa comes from West Africa, where issues like low farmer incomes and even child labor have cast a dark shadow on chocolate’s supply chain. The craft makers see their approach as part of the antidote. Nearly all of them source their cacao beans carefully and conscientiously. Instead of buying anonymous commodity cocoa from a broker, they seek out direct trade relationships with farmers and co-ops whenever possible, paying prices far above the market rate. David Menkes, for instance, sources beans from a family farm in Belize and a fermentary in Tanzania, paying farmers several times what they’d get from the big buyers. “Knowing that the farmers are getting paid fairly – at least double the going rate for their cacao – and that their practices are environmentally responsible makes us feel better about every bar we sell,” he says. It’s a common sentiment in the craft chocolate scene: quality and ethics are inseparable. By paying more and focusing on fine-flavor cacao varieties, these makers support farmers who are cultivating better strains of cacao and fermenting and drying them with care – steps essential to great chocolate. In turn, farmers have incentive to continue those practices and even improve them, rather than abandon their farms or switch to other crops.

This direct connection to the raw material also feeds the experimental spirit of craft chocolate. Unlike industrial producers who blend cocoas from dozens of origins to achieve a uniform taste, small makers revel in the distinct character of each bean source. They often release limited-edition bars whenever they get their hands on a new origin or a unique harvest. One season, a maker might offer an extremely small batch of chocolate made from wild cacao harvested in the Bolivian Amazon, or from a single estate in Madagascar renowned for its citrusy cacao. These bars become coveted treasures among the chocolate cognoscenti – discussed in online groups, traded, even hoarded in freezers to preserve them. The craft makers, free from corporate dictates, also love to experiment with flavor inclusions and techniques. They might age cocoa nibs in whiskey barrels to infuse smoky notes, or create a bar with dried local cherries and sea salt for a regional twist. Some are reinventing tradition: in San Francisco, a tiny workshop produces only fresh chocolate drinks inspired by ancient Mesoamerican recipes, grinding cacao with spices and serving it as frothy drinking chocolate in a speakeasy-style café. In New Orleans, another chocolatier works exclusively with heirloom Louisiana cane sugar and single-farm cacao to create a “terroir bar” that marries the flavors of two origins – the cane fields and the cacao forests. In short, experimentation is the lifeblood of the chocolate underground. With no shareholders to please and small scales that allow agility, these makers can afford to take risks and push boundaries. If a wild idea fails, they chalk it up as a learning experience and try something new.

A Quiet Revolution, One Bar at a Time

Over the past decade, the craft chocolate subculture has steadily grown from a smattering of bold hobbyists into a bona fide movement. Back in 2005, you could count the number of American bean-to-bar chocolate makers on one hand. Today, there are over 200 in the United States alone, and hundreds more across the globe, from Paris to Lima, Manila to Melbourne. Many remain very small – truly mom-and-pop operations or solo endeavors – and together they still account for only a tiny fraction of the chocolate consumed worldwide (by some estimates, well under 1%). And yet, their impact and influence extend far beyond their size. The larger industry has started to take notice. Premium divisions of big chocolate companies have begun marketing bars as “single-origin” or “bean to bar” to capitalize on the trend. In response, craft makers find themselves in the odd position of being tiny Davids nudging the Goliaths. Some welcome the wider awareness – if Hershey’s is talking about cacao origins and farmers, that’s progress of a sort. Others worry about “bean-to-bar” becoming a hollow marketing slogan if the spirit of true craftsmanship isn’t there. But for the most part, the underground makers keep their heads down and focus on what they love: sourcing the best beans they can, and turning them into chocolate that speaks for itself.

There is a palpable sense of mission among these crafters. They often speak about “educating the palate” of the public, introducing people to what real chocolate can taste like when it’s not drowned in sugar or vanillin and when the cacao itself is treated with respect. “Once you’ve tried chocolate made from a single farm’s beans, it’s hard to go back to the mass-produced stuff,” notes a chocolate shop owner in Portland who carries dozens of craft brands. “It’s like the difference between a generic jug of wine and a beautiful small-batch vintage.” Indeed, walking into a well-stocked craft chocolate shop is an adventure for the senses: bars lined up by region or cacao percentage, wrappers often adorned with artful designs and telling the story of their makers. Some bars boast tasting notes on the label (“ripe banana, honey and malt”) inviting consumers to really notice flavor in a confection that is too often scarfed absentmindedly. Workshops and tasting flights are increasingly offered, giving curious chocoholics a chance to learn and appreciate. Bit by bit, the craft chocolate underground is winning converts.

Yet for all their quiet growth, those in the subculture still see themselves as underdogs – and maybe that’s part of the appeal. There’s a renegade pride in doing chocolate the hard way, in secret, away from the neon shine of corporate factories and disposable novelty candy. It harks back to an earlier era of artisans, or perhaps even to chocolate’s own ancient roots when small villages would harvest and grind cacao for communal enjoyment. By reclaiming chocolate from the clutches of mass industrialization, these urban craft makers feel they are restoring chocolate to its rightful place: as a food of depth, nuance, even reverence.

As the clock nears 1 A.M., Rasmussen pours a final tray of chocolate to set overnight. He’s visibly tired – tomorrow he’ll be up early to get his kids ready for school before logging in to his day job – but there’s a contented smile on his face. He holds up one of the freshly molded bars, still glossy and warm, examining it under the basement’s single bright work lamp. The bar is dark, nearly black, studded with the faint shimmer of sea salt crystals on its back. It carries the aroma of the Peruvian jungle from which its cocoa was grown, and in a few days, it will be wrapped in hand-stamped paper and labeled with its origin and vintage. Perhaps it will be sold at the local market to a passerby, or maybe traded with a fellow maker for one of their creations. In either case, it represents something far greater than a simple sweet treat. It’s the product of ingenuity, passion, and a commitment to doing things differently. It’s a tiny piece of a far-flung brotherhood and sisterhood of chocolate makers who toil in kitchens and workshops when the world isn’t watching. The chocolate underground is very real – a subculture hiding in plain sight, united by love for the world’s favorite bean and the alchemy of turning it into gold.

And as Rasmussen can attest, once you’ve experienced the thrill of that alchemy, there’s no turning back. In basement labs and hidden kitchens across the city – and across the globe – the quiet revolution carries on, one handcrafted bar at a time.