Amano Artisan Chocolates

Your chocolate bars are exquisite! Top quality dark chocolate bars through and through. All of them! My favorites are your Dos Rios and Ocumare bars
FYI I discovered Amano bars here in Sacramento through Taylor’s Market.

Great chocolate! But how the heck can you buy it if the store front is always closed? Do you sell to stores or where can we buy it!!!

Best chocolate I’ve ever had. My #1 choice. Not a hyperbole. There are a lot of good chocolates but most are mass produced and end up losing some quality or their distinctive character. Guittard, Scharffenberger, Lindt, Green and Black; then there are truffle chocolatiers Gearharts, Chuao, and they are good but sometimes too sugary. Gearharts is phenomenal though.
It’s dark chocolate so only real connoisseurs will love or appreciate it.
Unfortunately I haven’t seen it retailed in SoCal. Maybe it would put too much pressure on production. Maybe some day. I think it’s available to mail order but I never have. I usually just pick some up when I’m in Utah.

Best. Chocolate. Ever. If you can find a time when their store front is open, go there so they can teach you how to taste it. (Sounds weird but it is seriously an art form, kind of like wine tasting, and you will be so glad you did it!) It seems like you can check their Facebook page or website to see if they’re open.
If they’re closed, you can get their bars at Harmon’s grocery store.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the best chocolate manufacturer in the United States. Amano owns the process all the way from bean to bar and values quality far more than quantity. It has been winning awards from the London Academy of Chocolate for years and is the most highly-​respected non-​European bar manufacturer. And the first time you warm the chocolate between your fingers, gauge the aroma, and place it on your tongue, you will understand that Amano really is a cut above the rest.
The difference is the TLC that goes into the product. The bars are single-​bean bars, meaning that the cocoa beans that go into a particular bar were harvested from one specific town or region. This is because every bean has its own unique flavor profile; muddling them all together as 99% of chocolatiers do dramatically detracts from complexity and causes the chocolate to be one-​note. Amano also does not have a set time for conching the chocolates; they know that every chocolate requires different temperatures and times. This also means that they don’t over-​conche their chocolate, which many manufacturers do (under the current trend that 72+ hours is always better), which is a leading cause of flat or bland bars.
Enough about the process, let’s get to the good stuff. I’ve been buying Amano chocolates for years, but my favorite bars are:
Madagascar 70%: It starts off citrusy, carries a fruity, raspberry-​ish note, and ends a bit woody. This bar is commonly used among the nation’s top pastry chefs.
Dos Rios 70%: From the Dominican Republic. It starts off with a strong orange flavor with a bit of a floral note and ends with a cinnamon-​clove taste. I haven’t found a comparable bar among other top manufacturers; Amano seems to have the monopoly on the region.
Ocumare 70%: This is a popularly-​harvested region but it’s still one of my favorites. The chocolate is deep and rich but also carries a fruity, plum note. There’s also a lighter 30% bar.
I’ve never found any blooms on Amano’s bars, which is a testament to their selectivity, quality-​control and careful packaging. The factory offers tours (but call ahead to check hours) and offers generous samples. It’s not much to look at from the outside, but after learning about and trying their chocolate, you’ll never be the same.

Amazing chocolates, but sadly it’s very, very tough to know if their ‘store front’ is open. They also don’t carry anything but their bars right now… I get the bad feeling that their in trouble. I hope they can pull it together, their chocolate is top notch.

They are very friendly and eager to teach you about the most awarded chocolate in the world. They’ll explain where the different beans come from, how they’re roasted, and the hints of flavors in each of the different chocolates. They’ll let you taste samples of the different chocolates before you decide what you like.
These bars are not blended chocolate as is common, but are single-​bean chocolates with a little sugar and vanilla. The cocoa beans come from such far-​reaching places as Venezuela, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Madagascar.
The cocoa beans are roasted, ground, and made into chocolate in small batches using imported German equipment. They work with small batches of beans, roasting for different lengths of time at different temperatures until they get the amazing, complex flavors they are looking for.
Most of the chocolate is dark, 70% cocoa solids. All of it was delicious. At between $ 7 and $ 10 for 2 ounce bars, the price is relatively high, but the flavor is wonderful.
Amazingly, this gourmet chocolate treasure is housed in an unassuming building in an industrial park in Orem! You can also find their chocolates in stores around the area, such as Harmon’s, or you can order it online.

I think the most amazing thing about this chocolate is that they generally all have the same ingredients but they taste so different! In the tour (highly recommended) they said that they don’t add flavoring, other than a little vanilla, they just highlight the cocoa beans’ genetic differences.
You should go to the factory store to sample everything and then buy as much as you can. If you like dark chocolate at all, you won’t regret it.

Great chocolates. I have always loved dark chocolate up to 80% but prefer 70% and I guess Amano agrees. Anyway, the tour was very informative about the chocolate crafting process, both theirs and others and to see the antique equipment was fun.
I had just about everything in the factory store. My favorites in order of preference are:
1. Chuao — Best combination of complexity and full bodied flavor and exemplifies the great things you can do with a single bean, awesome for those who really like pure chocolate taste.
2. Cuyagua — A little more neutral than Chuao but very nice and complex. Again, a pure chocolate taste.
3. Dos Rios — Flavors that give you a nice pop with an interesting citrus flavor that’s a great contrast to the above two. Can’t believe this much flavor can come from one bean and no added flavors.
4. Madagascar — A bit more «in the face» complexity compared to the top two but not as much as Dos Rios and like a good wine makes you think about what you’re eating as the flavors develop on your tongue. Has a little more lingering aftertaste and not quite as clean as the others so liked Dos Rios better.
The Montanya tasted pretty much like where the beans are from, the mountains, as they had a flat and kind of earthy flavor to them. Not my favorite but if you like that type of taste it would be a good choice.
Ocumare was neutral tasting to me without much complexity. Not saying it’s bad but the other ones definitely overshadowed it.
Guayas I can’t remember really but I think it was ok but didn’t impress me enough to buy as I had already dropped about $ 80 there.
I also got a 6 truffle box and all of them were outstanding. The texture is perfect as you would expect starting from the quality of the chocolate base they are starting from and each had a sweet but not overly sweet taste and none of them had that gimicky gooey filling that gushes out and makes a mess. A very nice gift for most people as the dark chocolate bars are probably more for people with discerning chocolate palates whereas these would be really enjoyed by anyone.
The melted sipping chocolate (and I mean you have to sip it, not drink) was nice for the first couple sips but is quite thick and strong so I would pass if I go there again or share it with a couple other people.
These guys are purists so don’t really believe in making milk chocolate but they make one bar and I think that’s my next thing to try.
It’s great to have a business from the state you come from that you can say produces some of the finest stuff in the world. They make great gifts that aren’t so generic.
Next time I make it out to Europe, I’ll take some of these bars and do some taste testing.

Take the tour at the factory in Orem! It is actually interesting. THEN, buy as much chocolate as you can afford. Yes, this is the real deal. Something to be proud of here in Utah. This is the type of chocolate you want to share with your friends overseas, and where ever you visit.
My favorite so far: Dos Rios

Single origin dark chocolate bars don’t get any better. The chocolates are some of the best I’ve had.
A number of years ago I spent more than a year, across a dozen trips around the country, collecting 70% chocolate bars. Some friends and I did a tasting that took the entire evening. I love chocolates. Nobody I know has chocolate that shows off the differences of it’s origin better than Amano. Having taken one of the recent tours, I can see why.
When I took my wife to Belgium this Spring we commented more than once that the chocolates we were tasting were not as good as Amano. I noticed the same thing when I visited there while I was working in the area. There is one chocolatier in Paris I prefer. Sometimes great milk chocolates can be really good too. When I used to do work in London, I would hit Harrods before going to the airport. They had some chocolates with so much fresh cream they needed to be eaten in three days. There was just enough time to fly them home and eat them with my wife. Amano is the same type of good, even if they don’t believe any milk chocolate can be good.

The best chocolate made in America. Period. Not the best in the world; that’s still probably Amedei. But to have the best in America made right in Orem, is amazing. If you don’t know anything about actually good chocolate, then beside getting some here, try a chocolate class at Caputo’s in Salt Lake.

Initially learned about this place from Pizzeria 712 and the amazing chocolate cheesecake Amano provides them (I think that is what we’ll eat in heaven, just without the calories).
My whole family of 7 trooped over to the factory to check this place out and we couldn’t have been treated any more kindly. The place is gorgeous, with a table full of their goods as well as a statue made entirely out of chocolate. The awesome guy there (I can’t remember his name!) told us all about the different kinds of chocolate they had there and allowed us to try ALL of them – that times 7 people is a lot of chocolate.
We wandered around checking things out before we made our purchase (we went for the ¼ kilo packages of «baking» chocolate – still the same stuff as the bars, just not as pretty and a little more of a snap to it) and once we were headed out, he gave us complementary packages of brownies for the road. After sampling all of that amazing chocolate I was reticent to try a lowly brownie, for fear of it not tasting great. But these brownies were beyond amazing. Good chocolate + high quality baking ingredients = WOW.
I’ve slowly been going through my stash of chocolate since leaving UT, but every time I open that bag of chocolate I swear I hear angels singing.

Amano makes very high end single origin chocolates. It’s very, very good indeed. Put it this way: I feel Amano choclates are better than Valrhona single-​origin chocolates. Amano chocolates are eye-​wateringly expensive, but it’s worth it to experience the differences and complexity in flavor that the beans exhibit.

This is some of the best chocolate I have ever had. I highly recommend it. Dos Rios was my favorite, and the truffles then had in the store were fabulous.