About Us

Special Edition Chocolate is a small artisan company in the foothills of the Lincolnshire Wolds.  We have a chocolate shop on site and you can also have our chocolates delivered.

It is the baby of Rosanna Benn, a self confessed chocoholic and Home Economist.  The company makes continental chocolate to the highest standard.

Rosanna recently went on a back packing holiday to Venezuela to track down a small farmer/producer whom she had met at a Chocolate Show in London seven years previously, with the idea that she may use his product for her own use.

This is her story:-

I flew to Caracas and met up with my son’s girlfriend Livs.  She had had a terrible journey flying up from La Paz where she had been working with street children and in an orphanage. Due to cancelled internal flights and huge delays it had cost her more than it had cost me because she was determined to get to Caracas to meet me!

We had a further delay as my back pack was still in Milan so we had to spend a night in a grotty 2 star hotel and then wait for the next flight out from Milan, 24 hours later to see if my back pack was on that one!! The journeys from and to the airport were hairy. The distance was about the same as from Heathrow to Central London but the scenery rather different and the volume of traffic much worse and as for the driving...............!!!!

We planned our route, travelling on buses, staying in hostels, sometimes taking an overnight bus.  The last leg of the journey was in a cart as the taxi drivers seemed too superstitious to venture in to the rain forest!!

We eventually arrived at a small hacienda run by mother and son.  Son Billy, an engineer, had been in the tourism industry in Venezuela. One day, whist travelling in the area with his father, he had come across a derelict property with two acres of land for sale. There was a plantation of non productive cocoa trees within those acres.  He decided to buy! He would convert the buildings into a home for him and his mother, and 4 guest rooms with a small swimming pool.  By using local labour he would re energise his piece of rain forest and get his cocoa trees back to full production and plant more.

He would not only produce beans for export but he decided to produce his own chocolate bars. By using his contacts in the tourism business he would be able to arrange small coach parties to come and visit him.  He sourced second hand machinery from all over the world to set up his own factory where he was able to produce his chocolate from bean to bar.

Because I was in the chocolate business he allowed me to work with him.  First we would harvest the pods from the trees cutting them off with a machete.  We would split them open, take out the beans, strip off the white pulp that surrounds the beans (a bit like the white fur inside a broad bean pod).  This was later fed to animals.  We spread out the beans in a nest of banana leaves, covered them with banana leaves and left them to ferment for 4-5 days.  This alters the flavour inside the cotyledon.  We then transferred them to direct sunlight to dry for another 3 days, turning them over with a rake.

They were then sieved in an enormous riddle to remove any unwanted bits and then we roasted them in a large rotating oven for about 2 hours at a temperature over 200degrees C. Oh the smell was amazing!! The roasting dries and darkens the beans and brings out the flavour.  The beans are then cracked and winnowed- i.e. - the outer shells are cracked and blown away leaving the crushed and broken bits called nibs. We then crushed the nibs to form a thick paste called chocolate liquor which is very bitter and very grainy so a little sugar and vanilla was added.  The liquor was then put through a series of steel rollers to refine it for up to 6 days.

The finished product can then be called `fine chocolate, i.e. when the chocolate melts on the tongue it feels so deliciously smooth, like liquid velvet. One would never know that it was ever a bean!  Poor farmers can only afford to do this for maybe one day but then their chocolate cannot be called `fine`

Anyway that’s what we did for a couple of weeks and it was such fun!

I am, very unfortunately, not able to use his product at the moment as no one else is using it in this country so the price for me to import it would be prohibitive.