Steelgrass Chocolate Tasting Tour
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Steelgrass Chocolate Tasting Tour
/ United States / Hawaii / Kauai County / Wailua Homesteads / Tours & Activities /
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Steelgrass Chocolate Tasting Tour

3 h
About this activity
Hawaii is the only state where the chocolate tree grows, and the best place to experience a live chocolate tree orchard is the Lydgate familys eight-acre Steelgrass Farm. Youre invited to enjoy Chocolate from Branch to Bar, an educational guided tour of everything there is to know about chocolate, including growing cacao trees, harvesting and curing cacao beans, all the way to the finished product everyone loves. Our tour is family-friendly: kids 12 and under attend free with an accompanying adult, and with so much to see, smell, learn about and taste, the Farms wide-open spaces make this a wonderful event for even small children. In addition to all the tropical fruit and chocolate we taste, the tour is a visual feast as well, so be sure to bring your camera. BOTANICAL TOUR AND TROPICAL FRUIT TASTING: The first part of our three-hour guided tour is especially fun for fruit and flower lovers, as we stroll through our gardens, stopping frequently to taste the tropical fruits that are in season. Depending on the month, these may include Tahitian lime, Hawaiian sugar cane, lilikoi, rambutan, longan, lychee, soursop, sapodilla, eggfruit, kau orange, watermelon radish, mountain apple and others. Youll also taste our Farms award-winning Palm Blossom Honey, and see vanilla beans growing on the vine, plus dozens of exotic tropical plants such as our rare red sealing-wax palms and black bamboo. All along, your guides will share with you our familys vision for creating sustainable diversified agriculture on Kauai. After the main fruit tasting we reach the chocolate orchard, and here you get to taste one more fresh fruit: in season, we will cut open a ripe chocolate pod and pass it around for everyone to sample. We then move through sugarcane and pineapple plantings into our chocolate tasting tent, where you sit comfortably in the shade while we go over the many steps involved in processing raw cacao. As you may know, dark chocolate is actually health food, and your guides will explain its antioxidant and other health benefits, as well as outline how you can make chocolate from scratch in your home kitchen. CHOCOLATE TASTING Best of all, youll enjoy an eleven-course dark chocolate tasting, sampling rare and delicious chocolates from Hawaii and all over the world. The Hawaii chocolates we taste include our own Steelgrass Farm single-estate bar, plus the best from the Original Hawaiian Chocolate Company on the Big Island, and Waialua Estate on Oahu. From Ecuador we taste Kallari; Valrhona from Madagascar and Trinidad, Guittard and Santander from Colombia, Felchlin and Taza from the Dominican Republic, and the finest single-origin bars from Dandelion Chocolate in San Francisco. Youll also learn chocolates history, from its discovery by the first Meso-Americans, to its revered status as a divine plant in the Olmec, Mayan and Aztec cultures, to its introduction to Europe in the 1600s, and finally how an American inventor, Milton Snavely Hershey, made the nickel Hershey bar (1905) and the Hersheys kiss (1907) into enduring American institutions.
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Features
Tourism
80%
Food
70%
Cultural
60%
Original
45%
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