01 / Day 0 · Open
A bar begins as a wet seed.
Forty beans in sweet white pulp, cut from the tree at dawn and opened by hand before noon.
Pod pulp · 27 °C02 / Days 1–14 · Box & sun
Flavour is made in the box.
Nobody adds heat. Yeasts eat the pulp, the mass warms itself to 48 °C, then a week of sun dries it to keep.
Peak 48 °C on day 4 · dried at 34 °C03 / Day 40 · Roast
Roast low enough to taste the place.
A dark roast makes every origin taste alike. We stop at 121 °C after twenty-two minutes and keep the valley in it.
121 °C · 22 min · drum no. 204 / Days 41–43 · Conche
Seventy-two hours of slow friction.
Granite rollers work nibs and cane sugar below 70 °C until the grit is gone and the sharp acids have aired off.
68 °C held for 72 h05 / Day 44 · Temper
The last four degrees decide the snap.
Melt to 45 °C, cool to 27 °C, lift to 31 °C. Only one crystal form survives, and it is the one that shines.
45 → 27 → 31 °C · form V crystals06 / Days 45–61 · Rest
Then it waits in the dark.
Wrapped bars rest at 18 °C for two weeks while the flavour settles. The snap stays clean; the gloss holds.
18 °C · 17 days07 / Batch 14
1,200 bars. Two ingredients.
Seventy per cent cacao and cane sugar, from one harvest and sixty-one days of watching. Released 3 November.
Reserve a Batch 14 barBars from Vael's own ledger. Temperatures are the maker's process notes, not lab data.