Red Star Chocolate is a small artisan chocolate making company that produces Duffy’s fine chocolate in Lincolnshire. We source the finest beans that we can find, working directly with the cocoa farmers or as close as we can get. We pay a premium for the finest beans so that the cocoa farmers realise that we appreciate the work they put into growing top quality beans and fermenting and drying them after the harvest.
All of our bars are single origin – they are made with beans from one harvest from one region of one country. The taste of each bar will very year-on-year: as the growing conditions change so the flavours slightly change.
Once the beans are here they are cleaned and sorted before they are carefully roasted, de-shelled and stone ground in a slowly-rotating granite grinder for over 50 hours so that the naturally present complex flavours are allowed to fully develop. The other ingredients – usually just Fairtrade/organic sugar for dark chocolate plus milk powder for milk chocolate – are checked and added.
The chocolate is ready to be poured into bars, each one representing over 3 days of careful and precise work but the minimum of intervention. Please read the flavour profiles for each bar and be prepared to love this chocolate.
Duffy’s Corazon del Ecuador – (“Heart of Ecuador”) is our first bar to be released and is available as a 72% dark chocolate and a 43% milk chocolate. The beans are grown organically but are not certified. Fairtrade/organic sugar is used throughout.
Shortly there will also be available bars made from fully Fairtrade and Organic ingredients and the first of these will be a 70% Peruvian dark chocolate and a 43% Peruvian milk chocolate.