Champion Juicer - the VW beetle among kitchen machines

After we have roasted 20 kg of the cocoa with Martin Stiegler, we now have to process it further. In order to separate the Cascara (= bowl) from the beans, the cocoa beans have to be broken first. So far, we had peeled the cocoa beans by hand, which is a tedious and protracted endeavor. We had also tried various other methods and worked on the beans with heavy cast iron pans or with the rolling pin. Everything not very effective and not the last word on the subject. Fortunately, we are now very well networked, so we asked Holger in't Veld how he breaks the beans. He recommends the Champion Juicer - a robust juice press that has been produced by a small factory in California for more than 50 years. Since the machine costs more than 400 euros, Christoph researches on Ebay for a used one.

3,2,1 - mine! We buy a Champion Juicer for 200.- Euro. After the delivery, we test the device immediately for its functionality: It makes a hell noise and the test-broken beans are flying somewhat uncontrolled around the area. In addition, we find that the nibs produced by the Juicer are very small and there is still very much fine dust. We are already somewhat skeptical ...

Update to the mixture of the flight-fermented DHL beans, which we put into pure alcohol 10 days ago: The liquid turns slowly to reddish.

In today's newspaper the storm from Friday is still one of the main topics. It turns out that it has hit other people much worse than us and we had a lot of luck.