We get asked why a bar takes six weeks to leave our kitchen. The honest answer is that the chocolate decides when it's ready, and we listen.
Hand-tempered, not machine-tempered
A machine can hold cocoa butter at the right temperature for hours. What a machine can't do is watch the chocolate fall off a spatula and decide it needs another minute. Hand-tempering means a person stands at the stone, watching the way the chocolate moves, deciding when crystallisation has reached the precise window where the bar will snap cleanly and melt at body temperature.
Done well, a hand-tempered bar holds a sheen that machine-tempered chocolate never quite reaches.
Oils that bloom late
Most flavoured chocolates hit you with their flavour the moment the bar touches your tongue. We do the opposite. Our peppermint oil opens around the fourth or fifth chew; the lemongrass arrives once the chocolate has begun to melt. The result is a piece that tastes like three different things in twelve seconds.
Getting that timing right is mostly about which oil, in what quantity, blended at what stage of tempering. We rejected eight peppermint suppliers before we found one whose oil behaves this way.
Why six weeks
A new flavour spends three weeks in tasting. Then two weeks in cold-storage maturation, which lets the oil and cocoa marry. Only then does it go into production runs. Most chocolate brands compress this to days. We can't — the patience is the product.