Crow & Moss' Chocolate Bars

Tastemaker

By Lynda Wheatley | Nov. 9, 2019

All good things begin with chocolate, but some of the very best chocolate bars, it turns out, are born from heirloom cacao beans sourced from single farms in some of the world’s hardest to reach places. Then, in Petoskey, in wee 100-pound batches, they’re hand-sorted, roasted, cracked, winnowed, refined, conched (think “polished”), then precisely warmed and cooled. Luckily for us, Mike Davies, of Petoskey’s newly launched Crow & Moss chocolate, takes the time. For his Honduras Wampusirpi bar — earthy, malty, and deep with notes of honey, banana, and toasted walnuts — he brought in a 2018 harvest of beans from a remote part of northeastern Honduras, accessible only by a two-day journey by canoe. For the Brazilian Santos Coffee bar, he’s blended coffee — dried right inside coffee cherries hauled from southern Brazil’s Santos region — with cacao beans grown on a finca on the eastern edge of Columbia. One bite of either bar, and you’ll understand why Davies goes so far. You, however, don’t even need to get off the couch. Order any (or many) of his five exotic chocolate bars ($9 each) directly from www.crowandmoss.com. Can’t wait? You can also find them at McLean & Eakin Booksellers and Symons General Store, both in Petoskey.