A pair of Morgantown brothers is sourcing international cacao beans to create delectable chocolate.
Written By Adrian Kiger
When it comes to delicious chocolate, it turns out that the secret really is “less is more.” Local brothers Jonny and Jacob Haring are sourcing cacao beans from specific regions worldwide to create superb, artisanal dark chocolate bars for their company, Holly Lane Chocolate. The bars are made with only two ingredients—cacao beans and cane sugar—and the end result is an exotic taste rich with depth and flavor, dark chocolate at its best.
The affable young men not only grew up on a street named Holly Lane, but had holly bushes in their yard as well. They wanted to do a business together. Jacob Haring has a culinary background and worked at Nemacolin Woodlands Resort for a number of years—not, ironically, in the pastry kitchen—and his brother is a graphic designer. On a trip to Las Vegas, he happened into a single origin chocolate shop, where he tasted three different samples and learned that the chocolate only had two ingredients. The only difference between the bars was the origin of the beans.
With wine, the taste varies depending on the conditions that the grapes were grown in, aspects of the soil, and geographic location, and Jacob Haring hadn’t realized that the same is true for chocolate. His curiosity piqued, he spoke with his brother soon after, and they decided to give “bean to bar” chocolate a try. He purchased a small melanger—a stone grinder that crushes the beans into melted chocolate. He experimented with this process out of his home, while Jonny Haring focused on package design and marketing.
Two things quickly became clear: There is a market for artisanal chocolate here in West Virginia, and, in order to produce any significant volume of bars, more space and bigger machinery would be necessary. So after two years of selling their bars out immediately, they rented an immaculate space in the Seneca Center and purchased larger machines that enabled them to increase production volume.
Holly Lane’s cacao beans are imported from three parts of the world: Tanzania, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. After sampling some chocolate bits from each bar, I could taste the unique flavors of the beans from these diverse areas. Tanzania, my favorite, has hints of lemon, blackberry, walnut, and coffee. The bar made with beans from Peru tastes heavily of fudge with hints of banana, and the Dominican Republic bar has a more nutty flavor with hints of caramel and cherries. Each bar was complex, truly like nothing I have tasted before. This kind of chocolate is not, like most bars, a mix of cacao beans from all over—it is from one single source, and this simplicity makes all the difference.
Holly Lane Chocolate plans to do tastings and events in the future. The brothers are currently upgrading their packaging and increasing the size of the bars that they plan to sell in shops throughout West Virginia. They also intend to keep their “hands on every bar” and package each one themselves, as they have done since the beginning. The sky’s the limit for Holly Lane—because who doesn’t love chocolate?
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