TheChocolateLife::LIVE – Solar Drying Cocoa w/ GrainPro’s Diego Lara

When most people start talking about post-harvest processing, the focus tends to be on fermentation. And while good (we’ll set aside the discussion of ‘proper’ for now) fermentation is important, proper drying and storage are equally important.

For most, sun drying is the preferred, time-honored, method, and a wide variety of approaches have been developed to improve the sun drying process.

But sun drying is not always easy. The two photos in the featured image were taken by me in Ecuador in 2003 – the large image one wet day along the Rio Napo and the small image on a demonstration farm near Naranjal outside of Guayaquil. In some places, conventional sun drying is impossible, and so a number of approaches to drying that include burning fuels – from propane to coconut husks – are employed.

In this episode of TheChocolateLife::LIVE GrainPro’s Diego Lara will be joining me to discuss two different technologies they’ve developed to address some of the challenges of drying and alternatives to building expensive infrastructure.

If there is time, we’ll also be discussing some of the challenges of storing dried cocoa and solutions GrainPro offers for that purpose.

Resources

Other Galleries – Solar and Other Dryers in the Americas

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