Piura White 70% Dark Chocolate bar - Piura Department Peru

Provenance: Piura, Peru

Incredibly smooth origin with a long-lasting flavor. Our tasting notes: fruity and citric; medium acidity; mild panela, malt, and nutty notes. 

Ingredients: Native piura criollo beans, organic cane sugar, and cacao butter.

About this bean: 

(From our bean supplier)

The history of this bean origin is pretty interesting. Ready? Here we go.

​Thanks to a small break at the lowest point of the Andes, called El Paso de Porculla, the Mayo-Chinchipe-Marañón Amazonian cultures were able to make their way to the arid northern coast of Peru where they traded their cacao and other goods with coastal communities. Over millennia, amid tough growing conditions, these coastal communities helped the cacao adapt and thrive throughout various areas of the department of Piura—each area creating its own unique cacao bean origin.

One of those areas is home to the bean known as Piura White. And it grows in what are now the provinces of Ayabanca and Piura. More specifically the districts of Las Lomas, Tambogrande, Montero, Paimas, and Suyo. It’s an exceptional cacao harvested at an elevation of ~50-400m that will surely take your chocolate making to the next level.

Typically made up of ~30% white beans, Piura White is a mix of Native Piura Criollos that is light in colour and rich in complex dark fruit and citrus flavours with mild panela, malt, and nutty notes. It also has medium acidity and is extremely low in tannins—the likely result of these cacao trees not needing to ward off all the pests that come with more humid tropical climates, like Witch’s Broom. Piura White has done such a good job of adapting to this area’s low humidity and scarce water that if you transplanted them to the jungle today, they likely wouldn’t survive.

It is precisely this bean’s geographic location and rare growing climate, along with its uniquely evolved genetics, that have given it its unparalleled fine-flavour profile and made it a premium cacao that has been commercialized for thousands of years. Many of the scientific theories today, supported by well-known researchers, like Dr. Evert Thomas and Dr. Juan Motamayor, and Bioversity International are that cacaos in Central America likely came from Peru—through naval trade with coastal communities in this area that obtained their merchandise from the Mayo-Chinchipe-Marañón Amazonian cultures.​

If it weren’t for the Mayo-Chinchipe-Marañón cultures, who knows if cacao would have landed on the northern coast. And if it weren’t for the coastal communities who helped it thrive in the tough arid conditions, we may never have Piura White. And if we didn’t have Piura White, well, then we wouldn’t have one of the best fine-flavoured origins of one of the most sought-after bean genetics in the world.