ander¶
Belgium
ander is a Belgian cacao house founded by two brothers, Tom and Frederik Depoorter, under the line cocoa modernized. The premise is simple and slightly heretical: take cocoa beans seriously the way specialty coffee takes coffee beans seriously — single origin, plantation-traceable, roasted to a profile chosen by cupping rather than by habit.
They cup their beans alongside an award-winning bean-to-bar chocolatier and judge them against both the coffee and the chocolate flavour wheels, which is a neat summary of where the company sits. The selection criteria they name are transparency, quality, flavour and consistency.
cobea is their filter product: 180 g of light-roasted cocoa beans, pre-ground to a medium / medium-coarse size, meant to be hand-brewed in a cone filter exactly like a pour-over coffee. They were the first to publish single-origin slow-brew cacao built around that routine, and they advocate a single pour at 85 °C. It carries roughly a tenth of coffee's caffeine; the lift comes from theobromine instead, which is gentler and longer.
Both their drinking chocolate and their filter cacao were shortlisted by the Specialty Coffee Association as Best New Specialty Non-Coffee Beverage.