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How many cacao beans does it take to make a year’s worth of LetterPress chocolate bars?

(Hanna Carter / For The Times)
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2,959,560 million: The number of cacao beans the LetterPress Chocolate company roasted last year.

That’s right, LetterPress Chocolate co-owner David Menkes counts the beans that go into his chocolate bars, which are mostly 70% cocoa. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds, if you know that it takes 60 beans to make a single bar of chocolate at his Culver City bean-to-bar factory and retail shop.

For the record:

10:40 a.m. July 14, 2019This article incorrectly spells David Menkes’ last name as Menke.

Menkes and his wife and business partner, Corey — they have one other employee — molded 49,326 bars of chocolate last year, which adds up to the just under 3 million total. All those beans, sourced at origin — Tanzania, Trinidad, Peru, Belize, Ghana, plus a few other countries — required 2,401pounds of sugar and 72 hours on average to stone-grind each batch. (Some batches take 168 hours, as different origins have different amounts of acetic acid, which are driven off during the grinding process.)

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After all those hours of grinding, the blocks of chocolate are aged for an average of 30 days before being tempered into bars. The Menkes hand-wrap every bar: “It takes 1 1/2 hours for the two of us to wrap 250 bars while we listen to audio books,” he says.

LetterPress is getting a second grinder soon, at which point you can double many of these numbers.

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