Hi,

I am having trouble producing cocoa liquor/paste from roasted, winnowed beans with my corona grinder. It is only grindingit into coffee-like grounds, not liquor.

I have seen pictures online of others cranking out liquor with a manual corona grinder, so I know it is possible, but I do not know why I am only getting fine grounds.

My millis not a corona brand, but a victoriacast iron grinder.it's the same specs as a corona, steel burrs, etc. i had the burrs just about as close as they could be to create enough pressure. they were practically rubbing together.

Could someone please help me to grind out a paste??? Pics of my grinder are below.

Thanks

updated by @benjamin-harding: 04/10/15 10:48:59

Heat it up.

hi Sebastian,

i took them straight from the burner, winnowed them and ran them through the grinder, so they were still pretty warm. you think i should winnow them and then throw them back on the burner for a minute before I grind them?

what bothers me about this is that i then took the cocoa grounds produced by the corona grinder (which had cooled down by then)and ran them through a PITEBA oil press (with no heat added)and got a nice cocoa paste.

the pressure inside the PITEBA expeller was noticably greater than inside the Corona grinder. I will try again heating them, and try to put the burrs even closer together (if thats possible) to see if that works.

i'm worried that the corona mill i bought is somehow different from the one that is typically used for koko, but I dont see how as the specs are nearly identical. do the pictures of my grinder look different from any you are familiar with?

i'm open to anymore advice.

thanks,

Benj

I'd heat up the unit itself. you're passing what i'm guessing is a very small quantity (<1 kg?) through the unit, which appears to be at least 5x that mass which means it'll suck up the heat from your beans quickly. hard to say for certain from pictures, but it appears the gaps in your mill are not fine by any stretch, but sufficient to yield a very coarse grind liquor. all's it needs is the right temperature to help that along.

Hey Sebastian,

Just to update you, I tried the grinder again. This time I broke it. I heated the mill and put the plates as tight as i could get them. it worked a little bit better, but nowhere near the paste consistency that i got witht the PITEBA. I would tighten the plates periodically when they felt too loose, but then, under too much pressure (too tight) one of the spirals on the augar chipped and the augar plate feels much looser now. sometimes when i crank the handle the plate doesnt move. trying to mill cocoa was obviously too much for the machine.

the pictures on this blog http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/cacao/5291
show that it can obviously be done with a corona mill. this mill looks a bit more heavy duty than mine. i guess that's the difference. do you have any specific make/model/supplier of millthat you know will work?

I very much doubt you could get any cocoa butter out of this machine, not sure where you have seen this being used for cocoa butter extraction but if you have a Piteba you're probably much better off using that to press your cocoa butter. I extracted a few hundred grams of cocoa butter from a Piteba in maybe 20 minutes the other day. It's a pretty horrible machine to work with as everything is too small and using it with cocoa beans is probably a stretch too far from its original purpose, but at least you do get cocoa butter dripping out of the thing!