Casa Luker, Luker 1906 Premium Chocolate

juni 08, 2011

Casa Luker, Luker 1906 Premium Chocolate

CasaLuker has been a leading name in new world chocolate since José Jesús Isaza Jaramillo turned out the company’s first “pastilla” in the lush Andean highlands of Columbia’s Caldas Department in 1906. Today, CasaLuker draws on more than a century of experience in clean crop development and environmentally friendly land management with its educational farmers programm to produce a premium dark chocolate of exotic provenance and uncommon flavor: LUKER 1906.

The secret of LUKER 1906 begins with the beans. The LUKER cocoa bean variety is 100% pure Colombian in origin. Known as Trinitario, it is a hybrid variety derived from the “criollo” (or native) cocoa cultivated by the great Mesoamerican civilizations that invented chocolate (Forastero variety) and savored its pleasures long before the Europeans stumbled onto the scene.

Still grown today in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Mexico, Venezuela, and Columbia, criollo beans are the most prized in the world, and the source of its finest chocolate. LUKER has used modern agricultural techniques to create a choice criollo-based cocoa variety that is not available anywhere else in the world.

But it is not only the raw ingredients that make LUKER 1906 such a delight to the senses. LUKER’s cocoa beans are grown on thousands of small family farms in the fertile lowlands and foothills near the port city of Tumaco, on Columbia’s southwest coast next to the Pacific Ocean. Shunning pesticides and chemical fertilizers, these small farmers have taken advantage of Tumaco’s tropical climate and rich soil to bring out the full flavor potential of the LUKER cocoa bean, with its beguiling marriage of fruit and floral tones, balanced again bracing sharp notes.

All this did not happen by accident. As the saying goes, “Experience gives us what nature by itself cannot.” CasaLuker has been a driving force to improve techniques and methods of cocoa cultivation in Columbia for decades. In 1962, CafeLuker established the Luker Research and Educational Farm near the town of Palestina in central Columbia.

Perched at an altitude of more than 3,000 feet, Luker Farm is the only cocoa bean research center in all Columbia. It provides support to Columbian crop growers, technicians, institutions and universities dedicated to the field of agronomy. Its goal is to improve the productivity of the cocoa bean at the level of the Columbian grower and of the small private farms that cultivate cocoa traditionally.