Grenada Chocolate Festival 2019 | Brunch At the Tower & The Magic of Old Houses

I had the pleasure of attending Brunch at The Tower as well as be part of a Garden tour there during this year's Grenada Chocolate Festival; 2019. I don't know about you but for me being in extremely old houses has an air of magic. There is a mysticism in the reality that generations of people walked and worked these halls. Especially, since this house has a colonial past. There is history here, in every brick that was carried over on slave ship, then made part of this house's foundation. There is life energy in every flower planted by hands willing and unwilling both.

The Tower Brunch grows a plant seen all about Grenada called Butterfly Pea Flower. I admittedly, had never heard of it before attending the brunch. I am so glad that changed! Of course I looked it up and what did I find? Small island beauty as it is the Butterfly Pea Flower is famous and has been used in many a drink due to it's vibrant blue coloring!

 The Butterfly Pea Flower, when used for tea releases a richly hued dye that gives The Tower's signature blue ice tea it's mystique. It's an experience worth having to be handed a brightly brewed blue ice tea . I suggest strongly that you have a visit to The Tower and request it!

Brunch was an island mix of locally grown, organically tended, unique dishes. From warm dark chocolate doused savory dishes to juicy, fun shaped fruit salad that lavished your tongue in sweet fruit flavor, the moment you bit down.

And of course, tea, always tea! We are not, regardless of Columbus's fabricated ledgers, savages after all. Har har, see what did there?

Did the awe of this property stop there? No dear friends, it was just beginning! Onward, to the garden tour!!

 

The garden is alive and is felt all over the property, not just in it's designated section. It grows, extending leaves, branches, hands of praise to the sky. It embraces pillars and stairs, benches and pathways.  You cannot escape it in a way that you do not want to do.

I have come to understand that, at least in the case of my people, when we say that we are islanders people do not hear it all. They do not hear that we feel it. That we are saying we are part of this fertile soil, that we fill ourselves on this sweet, sacred Caribbean air. That we grow food with our hands and bent backs and knees. That we are kissed by freedom on the breeze.

Maybe they would understand better if they took a slow stroll through a living, breathing garden too...

Or maybe they still wouldn't understand. Maybe there is no understand the bones of a culture...there is experiencing though that I know for sure, in smiles, silence, skips and laughter like these...

I hope you get to feel that too some day. Maybe even at the next Grenada Chocolate Festival?!

Thank you to The Grenada Chocolate Festival for having me for yet another year! It was my extraordinary pleasure to be there and to be provided and opportunity to share these moments of magic with you dear reader. For date of the next Grenada Chocolate Festival 2020 click here!

Do you think old houses have a life of their own?

Peace. Love. Brunch!!
All photos taken by Grenada Chocolate Festival 

Cocoa Tea and Chocolate Talks at the House of Chocolate Grenada || Grenada Chocolate Fest2019

I had the pleasure of attending 'Cocoa Tea and Chocolate Talks at the House of Chocolate Grenada. On Wednesday 5th May, 2019. I know you're probably thinking, did she say a TALK? That can't be one of the fun ones! Well, jokes on you because I'm an academic  so of course this qualifies as my nerdy idea of fun! Also there was COCOA TEA, which I happen to love so much I have recently dubbed myself it"s beloved ambassador.

Now, as some of you may already know, cocoa tea is a drink made of dried concentrated cocoa, brought to a boil. Then, like most teas, it sees the addition of milk and sugar as according to preference. On my island of Grenada we grow organic, ethically made cocoa that is of exemplary quality. Go ahead, ask about us.

Cocoa tea is usually served hot. As it is made of the raw ingredient used as the base for all chocolate, it is rich, full bodied and if dried well in the processing part of the product, it is very healthy.

It is a drink I am extremely passionate about. As a child I was never a milk drinker really and while many city house hold children seemed to have grown up drinking milk, my countryside home really drank cocoa tea the majority of times.  It is a tradition for my family that spans generations, both paternally and maternally.  One of those things that never seemed odd until I discussed it with friends and found out that for them it was more treat than daily indulgence.

On our island Grenada it is made in a variety of ways, most commonly with the addition of cinnamon and bay-leaf during the boiling stage. As I lived that wonderful privilege of country life, I grew up picking a bay leaf (locally also called bounden leaf) off a branch, left to dry on our kitchen counter. I would pop it into a boiling pot of melting cocoa and watch the steam swirling up from that fragrant depth of soon to be liquid chocolate.

I wish I could describe for you the smell of a bay-leaf hitting that boiling hot, dark, swirling vat of cocoa. How it permeates...not just every room of a house with the smell of roasting cocoa bean but the general surrounding environment with it.

So many Sunday mornings I woke up by that smell, as my mother stood at our stove. Waking the house and my appetite with the stir of that pot of tea. I love it so much I've wrote poetry about it y'all! 

At the Grenada Chocolate Festival 2019, Cocoa Tea and Chocolate Talks, we were lead into discussion by Belgian professional chocolate taster: Le Cameleon Chocolate

She spoke to us of the differences between a traditional Mexican cocoa roast and a contemporary one.

I was enraptured. Since cocoa tea means so much to my family it was enthralling to find out that the Aztec made chocolate, oven roasting their beans and adding a smoky, woody taste to their chocolate not just for flavour but as a way to pay spiritual homage to their ancestors through the smoke ascension. 

Myself and Cameleon Chocolate sharing a cup of vegan cocoa tea from the House of Chocolate Grenada

I cannot help but marvel over how people, so far apart, so different in look, culture and geography, managed to work out a delicious endeavour so similar in it's process.

Here, at home in Grenada, we do a lot of stove top roasting of our cocoa beans. Maybe because with time it has seemed simply easier and time effective? Our chocolate taster reminded us of the importance of knowing the objective of chocolate tasting, is it for traditional notes of wood and smoke or modern notes of smoothness and spice? Notice where the emphasis lay on your tongue.

Afterword, the House of Chocolate gave us an exclusive look at how they make their cocoa tea in house and we got to tasting. We also had the opportunity to taste some rough ground chocolate from Tabasco Mexico, examining the story in the flavour of a treat typically used to make drinks. We noticed how it is 70 percent sugar and as a result, is more prone to melt quickly. How its roughness, mildly woody and smoky notes, play on your tongue a little before it is gone. We could then compare and contrast this with how our many grades of Grenadian chocolate tastes smoother, darker and leaves a burst of flavour long after it is gone...We got to taste this not just in tea but in House of Chocolate Grenada's jam filled bon bons!

Also pictured above: me dying over how cute this tiny treat is oh my goodness just LOOK at it!

I cant wait to have a dark roast, vegan styled cup of cocoa tea someday. Honestly with all that sharing of cultural similarities even in the face of difference, it's made me want to put Mexico on my list of places to visit for the first time in my life because what else do we do similarly, I wonder? The more we change the more we stay the same it seems...Thank God the cocoa stayed deliciously brewed!

How marvellous it was to taste and discuss the existence and relevance of cultural, historical tastes, verses modern taste and trends. How often we forget that food carries in it not just tradition but the stories of a people, long after are gone.  It makes me wonder what other stories meals have been trying to tell me....

Peace. Love. Cocoa Tea!
For more on the Grenada Chocolate Festival 2020 click here!

The Grenada Chocolate Festival 2018 :: The Chocolate Reign and the Mott Greene Legacy

Last year I had the extraordinary pleasure of being a part of the Grenada Chocolates Festival as a local blogger for its 2017 activities. (If you missed any of that you can find more on it my 2017 experience here.) This year, I joyously had the opportunity to attend a few of the Grenada Chocolate Festival's 2018 adventures. While I visited the Victory Chocolate Company and the Crayfish Bay Organic Cocoa Farm in 2017, I was able to go to the Mott Green Grenada Chocolate Company in 2018.

There, in the parish of St. Andrew, we were presented with a vast list of activity options as well as an intimate look at the life, vision and accomplishments of Mott Green. It was a bitter sweet gift to be able to have personal account of his life and passion for chocolate from people who where close with him and knew him, so very well. People like his business partner and friend Edmund Brown.

Now, amateur hiker that I am, I choose the simpler of routes and I decided not to take the trek to the sulphur spring. I have no regret though because as much as cocoa means to me as a Grenadian who enjoys cocoa tea as much as I do, I felt like it was my far over due duty to acquire a more intimate knowledge of the beginnings of my local chocolate industry.

As we coasted up the Eastern main road on to our destination in early morning, I had no idea my heart would become so much more tied up in the local cocoa diligence as it did by that day's end...It is so interesting how unexpectedly, a simple trip can change you.. I suppose I should have known this already after all my crazy experiences on vacation but I was about to learn that if you open yourself to receive everything an experience has to offer to you, it will stir change in you no matter the soil, whether home or abroad.

My tour started with the visiting of the old great house with a corresponding slave pen. If you’re not up to speed, ‘The Great House’ was commonly the ‘Master/Slave Owner’s’ residence where he lived with his family close enough to oversee his property. It is often a structure made to be awe inspiring, full of grandeur and dignity. Even with the passage of centuries the one we visited that day still architecturally has that air about it. Contrastingly, the slave pen is just the opposite. It is quite simply a claustrophobic, dark, dank, hole in the ground meant to break and subdue the spirit of men and women. On this property the two still stand footsteps apart. It hurts me every time to know that once people slept in a hole footsteps away from parties and fêting…but I think the experience of that pain remains important and I am glad that while we visited the cocoa plantation on that property we were allowed to feel the effects of history, re-mastered, so to speak.

We went on to a guided educational walk through the cocoa field, learning to recognize different species of cocoa by the leaves of their trees. We found ourselves, crunching dried leaves underfoot and looking up into cocoa framed, canapé skies. The voice of our guide spoke as we weaved our way through low hanging branches and past healthy, over grown roots of seasons and of hidden flowers ahead of us. 

 The rainbow colours of cocoa pods at every peripheral, as we walked along breathing in fruit fragrances and the intoxicating scent of cocoa in its natural, cared for environment. All of which, infused with the sweet taste of natural sugars, herbs, spices, clean air, Caribbean sunlight and rainforest rainwater to naturally spur on growth… God, I love this country! 

Then it was back to the factory for a tour of it, presentation on the founder of the Mott Green by his partner, national dish eating and a little stopping at the famous bonbon shop. 

 It was a packed day and I loved every moment of it! The entire thing was aesthetically pleasing sure but do you know what really caught my heart in a vice? Mott Green worked hard to establish the reign of the cocoa industry and now it is a beautiful rain that threatens its very flourish…

I was shocked to learn that our cocoa farmers are in danger of themselves disappearing due to growing older, lack of younger people getting into agricultural ventures and many other challenges the present day cocoa farmers are facing.

 Sorting coca with one of the ladies who has worked at the factory for decades!

I had the opportunity to speak with one of our cocoa farms for an in-depth chat about some of these challenges and we narrowed it down to two major issues negatively impacting the Grenadian cocoa industry and how these issues are frustrating farmers out of the profession while daunting and dissuading new comers to it. We also of course, brainstormed how we might attempt to fix those glaring issues as, after all, it is in our best interest as cocoa enthusiasts, chocolate lovers and Grenadians to so do. Here is what we came up with:

Major Challenges of Cocoa Farmers In Grenada:

Our local farmers are having serious trouble getting their cocoa produce sold due to lack of drying facilities and storage facilities for housing wet cocoa. Cocoa is as its peek in rainy season. However if the cocoa foundation has the monopoly on buying cocoa from our farmers and they do not have a storage facility large enough to house the vast amount of cocoa being produced on island, this means that so much product can be lost to spoilage. 

 Pictured: Me amongst some of the early machinery Mott Green modified to make chocolate out of Grenadian estate farmed cocoa. I know that to some it may not mean much but when I look at it I see what happens when vision meets determination and births a thriving business that grows a national economy!

The Grenadian raw organic cocoa market is expanding every day as demand continues to grow worldwide. Yet less cocoa will be bought from our farmers, if there is no way to turn the raw produce into a marketable good before the very climate that makes it great, also sends it back to ground. This is leaving our local farmers with so much high scale product and no one to whom they can sell it.

So how do we fix it?

Invest in alternative drying methods. As a Caribbean island (Big up 473 Pure Grenada the Isle of Spice!) I believe that solar powered cocoa drying facilities could be utilize to diminish cocoa being lost to spoilage.

Build facilities uniquely tailored to the storage and drying of said cocoa on the sight of cocoa plantations in an effort to encourage and empower local farmers to produce and sell more dried cocoa. This may require an agricultural grant or loan, material, the relevant training and certification workshops that would encourage farmers to maintain community based cocoa drying facilities.

Increase Promotion of Organic Farming within communities rich in cocoa estates. You see, continued emphasis on organic farming and an investment in drying and storage facilities for Grenadian Chocolate Companies so that they can dry their farmer bought, organic cocoa themselves, can only stand to positively propel the industry into further clean production or world so needs right now. This way, some of the burden can be taken of the local cocoa society to store and dry wet cocoa, farmers may not have to travel as far out of their communities to sell their produce and more home grown, organic cocoa product is available for export alongside local consumption.

I have seen my local cocoa product appreciated in my household for generations. I have smiled as a whole industry has continued to boom around it, expanding far into my past and likely far into my future. Now, the threat exists of extinction due to something that should not daunt a Caribbean industry. The issue of wet cocoa not being sufficiently dried before it is too late can be fixed but are we willing to invest in our food and long term employment? Will we see the longevity of an industry that continues to shower us in promise and national pride?

 

For the love of cocoa tea, I sure hope so.

Peace. Love. Invest Locally.
All photos by The Grenada Chocolate Festival 2018