Potomac Chocolate: a bean-to-bar chocolate operation

Ben Rasmussen’s laundry room doubles as a chocolate factory. To prepare the space for production, Rasmussen erected a wall, hacked an oven, built a winnower out of a Shop-Vac, and devised a slew of other contraptions for making chocolate. With his laundry room ready, Rasmussen launched Potomac Chocolate in July 2010. Within a year, he landed his artisanal chocolate bars in shops around the country and won the Silver award from the Academy of Chocolate for his dark Upala 70% chocolate bar. Rasmussen’s small-scale, do-it-yourself approach to chocolate making represents the rise of independent bean-to-bar producers. His chocolate bars are a pure expression of cacao beans and sugar. They have no preservatives, cocoa butter, or added flavors. Rasmussen handles every step of production, from roasting the cacao beans to tempering and molding. His products are available online at www.potomacchocolate.com. Addicted to his chocolate, I contacted Rasmussen back in January 2012 and traveled to his workshop in Woodbridge, Virginia, to photograph and learn about his process. Here are some of the photos that I captured: