Get behind the rope by going on a tour of the factory at Tucson favorite Monsoon Chocolate. Tickets cost $20 per person.
Ellice Lueders In the book, Charlie finds the ticket in a candy bar called the Whipple Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight. In the movie, the factory is illustrated in matching style, as a trippy, baroque cartoon: a chocolate river and technicolor lollipop forests.
The $20 tours, which happen several times throughout May, aren’t ostentatious or whimsical, yet they still seek to inspire. The Monsoon Chocolate factory begins in a room flanked with hefty jute bags, wherein lies the focus of the tour: the beans. The material of the tour includes a few precious substances. The first is cacao water, made from the pressed fruit that surrounds each seed that turns into a cocoa bean. Adam describes the taste of the water as “all my favorite tropical fruits in one,” but this is the first time he’ll talk about how many volatile flavor compounds exist in chocolate.
“When we say our chocolates are a partnership with farms, we really mean that,” Adam said. The first crucial steps to making chocolate are done on-site: growing and harvesting the fruits, fermenting the beans and then drying them into what we would recognize as a cocoa bean. Adam gets up from the head of the table and takes us into an alcove next to a window into a room with heavy machinery. Two miniature grinding machines are busy at work churning cocoa beans into chocolate.
This is the second time the tour feels more like a guided tasting: Adam dips sample spoons into each grinder: one contains beans alone, the other has cocoa butter and sugar added. We try them both. Adam shows us how he smells and snaps the chocolate, to understand its aromatic and textural composition. The snap shows how much of each core ingredient — cocoa, sugar, cocoa butter — is present.
He tells the family reunion from Washington state that the cafe will be open in a few weeks — pending city approval — and they cheerily indicate that they won’t be in town by that point. Instead, the family will be shipping Monsoon Chocolate to their homes across the country. The Tucson heat can melt the chocolate especially quickly, so this national delivery is no small feat.
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