I spent three days at Hacienda Victoria in October 2025, the farm that grows the cacao for our 72% Ecuadorian bar. The trip came out of a question I'd been sitting with for a year: why does our 72% taste so much like the beans from this one farm, when the same varietal grown two valleys over doesn't? The answer turned out to be in the post-harvest — specifically, in how the family ferments the wet beans.
The farm
Hacienda Victoria is a 220-hectare property in the Vinces region of Los Ríos, run by the Guerrero family for three generations. About 80 hectares are planted with cacao, primarily the Nacional Arriba variety — the fine-flavour cacao Ecuador is known for. The rest is a mix of plantain, citrus, and native forest. The family doesn't use any synthetic fertilisers; they compost cacao pod husks and use the plantains as shade during the first three years of a new planting.
The farm's wet-processing facility is a few hundred metres from the fermentary. Beans are depodded the same day they're harvested, then put into wooden fermentation boxes — three stages, six days total, with a turn every 48 hours. Most producers turn every 24 hours. Six-day ferments are unusual.
What I learned about fermentation
The fermentation is where the flavour happens. The bean comes out of the pod with a white pulp around it that's mostly sugar and water. Over the next week, yeasts and bacteria eat the sugar, the temperature climbs, and chemical changes inside the bean produce the precursors of chocolate flavour. If you stop too early, you get acidic, fruity beans with no depth. If you go too long, you get flat, dull beans.
The Guerreros ferment for six days because they've found that the last two days — when most producers stop — are where the Nacional Arriba character develops. The classic "floral, jasmine, slightly green" notes that Arriba is famous for come out in days 5 and 6. Stop on day 4, you get a fine but generic cocoa. Go all 6 days, you get something that tastes like Hacienda Victoria.
They also use a slightly lower turn frequency — 48 hours instead of 24 — which they believe produces a more even ferment with less acetic acid buildup. I tasted side-by-side samples from a 24-hour-turn batch and their 48-hour-turn batch, and the 48-hour version was noticeably rounder, with less sharp acidity and a longer finish.
What this means for us
It confirms what we already believed: the price we pay for these beans is justified, and the chocolate we make with them is genuinely differentiated by the post-harvest, not just the varietal. We've been telling customers for three years that the cacao is special. Now I can tell them why, in detail, with photos and a fermentation log.
The bigger question is whether we'll ever buy cacao from a different farm. Probably not for the 72% bar. The Guerrero family has the recipe, the consistency, and frankly the kind of patience that small-batch post-harvest work requires. For our 65% and our 38% bars we use different origins (Madagascar and Venezuela respectively) — and the 65% in particular has a much more aggressive fruit profile that suits the Madagascar beans.
If you want to know what Hacienda Victoria cacao tastes like, order a box of our 72% Ecuadorian bar. The floral, slightly honeyed, long-finish character is what those six fermentation days are buying us.