Beniano Chocolate

Beniano takes its name from Beni, a department of lowland Bolivia where cacao grows wild on "chocolatales", forested islands scattered across the seasonally flooded savanna of the Llanos de Moxos. Communities reach the trees mostly by river and gather the pods by hand, so a Beniano bar is about as close as chocolate gets to cacao in its natural state. Its modern revival as a specialty cacao is tied to conservation-minded wild harvesting with the region's indigenous communities.

Genetically it is treated as a distinct wild Amazonian population in its own right, studied specifically in Bolivia (Zhang et al., 2012) rather than folded into the domesticated Criollo line or any single group of the modern DNA map (Motamayor et al., 2008). In Chof, Beniano is emphatically Bolivian: every bar that names it is a single-origin Bolivia. Its flavour leans bright and fruity, with red and dried fruit, honey and floral notes over a nutty, mineral backbone, and it often turns up at a high cocoa percentage.