The mysterious voicemail from a well-informed friend arrived at the last minute. “Dude, we’re meeting in Red Hook in an hour and going to this bar that’s never open to taste homemade chocolate and drink homemade hootch. Wanna come?”
I arched an eyebrow, checked on clearing my schedule and called back.
“The guy designed one of those James Bond-style jet packs. That’s all I know. This is New York — are you coming or not?”
How do you say no? I hailed a cab and headed to Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, ending up in an empty bar where a man in a bowler hat poured a mean whiskey-based drink called a Blood and Sand. Nearby rooms, which have just been unveiled, house both one of the largest distilling apparatuses in New York state and a serious-looking chocolate manufacturing line. The whole complex is called Cacao Prieto.
The project is the brainchild of Daniel Preston, 40, a man of many brainchildren.
At 18, he started a glass company that improved neon sign electrodes. Later, he founded an aerospace company that worked for NASA and the Department of Defense. Now, his life is chocolate.
“The last grade I officially graduated from was fifth,” said Preston, who began unsuccessfully dabbling with college at age 12 and estimates the number of patents he holds at “about 100.”
Preston designed custom light bulbs and was flown around the world to design automating machines and assembly lines, ending up working on a gig with the European nuclear research organization, CERN. Soon after, he received a call from an American government agency he’d never heard of telling him he was in trouble for designing something that qualified as a nuclear trigger.
Unfazed and found innocent, Preston’s firm got a new gig, this time with PerkinElmer, the analytical equipment mega-corporation brought in to investigate the CERN case. PerkinElmer bought Preston Glass for a hefty sum.
“All of a sudden, I had nothing to do, so I took up skydiving,” he says. He eventually racked up thousands of jumps, but ended up breaking his C-6 vertebrae due to a design defect in one particular chute. His response? “I started making parachutes.”
His parachute project became Atair Aerospace, which broke records for the smallest chute that could be landed by a person and longest drift ratio (the run versus the rise of a jump).
Eventually, Preston went after bigger guns, winning grants from the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program, as well as the Army, Navy and NASA, running projects like designing wheeled and winged vehicles with two-day autonomy, coming up with satellite-guided parachutes and creating algorithms to drop a “swarm” of parachutes, each loaded with military supplies, to a precise point on the ground. The math for the latter was “based on the way starlings flock.”
The jet pack story makes its way in here. Originally a winged suit he “designed for fun,” he wore it into the DARPA offices where, “they paid me to put turbines on it.”
Preston was bought out again in 2009 by William E. Conway Jr., founder of the Carlyle Group, and the agreement came with a five-year non-compete clause.
Again, all of a sudden, Preston had some free time on his hands. This time he turned to the bottle, opening the Red Hook bar Botanica in the summer of 2009 to highlight herbal liquors, especially those from northern Italy. He modeled the bar’s design on the bar at Hotel Gritti Palace in Venice.
The New York City-born Preston also reconnected with his family in the Dominican Republic, noting that the great farms his family owned and barely held onto through a revolution and civil war in 1965 were eventually whittled down to a couple of small cacao plantations used mostly for ecotourism.
He was captivated by the plantations, explaining the otherworldly colors and peculiar sprouting capabilities of the cacao plants as if describing a scene from the jungles of “Avatar.”
As a scientist and a bit of a neat freak, however, he was driven bonkers by the fermentation process typically used in the Dominican Republic, where cacao pods are essentially left on the ground or in bags for days.
“You wouldn’t find a winemaker who’d thrown his grapes down in the field, stomp them right there and come back in a week hoping it all tastes good,” he said, wide-eyed with exasperation. “This is the process that makes chocolate taste like chocolate, but people have left it entirely up to chance.”
“As a scientist, I want to control variables, but nobody cared. The farmers just wanted disease resistance and high yields. The nursery didn’t care what the root stock was as long as it grew. It goes on an on — there’s no alignment of interest,” he says. “So we decided to do it all ourselves.”
For the fermentation, that meant cracking the cacao pods into stainless steel fermenters and experimenting with different yeasts, controlling inoculations to create different flavor profiles.
“By choosing the ‘bugs,’” he said, referring to the yeast, “you can drastically influence the flavors coming out of the beans.”
Food traditionalists might shudder at the thought of stripping the romance from the production process, but Preston leans toward the scientific.
“We try to control everything,” he said. “It’s only called an art when you don’t know what you’re doing.”
As he got further into the process, side industries began popping up like well-tended plants in a Dominican hothouse.
Preston started Cacao Biotechnologies, a company that bills itself as the “world’s preeminent expert on cacao biotechnologies and genetics,” which, among other things, creates cacao strains for the chocolate industry and phytonutrients for pharmaceutical companies. Or, as he mentions in an aside, “we sequenced the genome of cacao.”
In addition, Preston saw a need for production equipment geared for the rising numbers of artisanal producers. The only equipment out there not made for giant corporations was flimsy stuff made for hobbyists.
Calling on his industrial and aeronautical past, Preston began designing, building and selling his own machines to fill that need. On the Cacao Prieto plant floor, his “vortex winnower” is a glamorous-looking cousin to the vacuum cleaner that separates the skin from roast cacao nibs. On a computer in his office, there’s a design for a new style of bean roaster that looks like a chest-high, vertically mounted jet engine. The “vortex roaster” roasts beans — as they float on a cushion of hot air.
Some of the other equipment on the line includes parts from the now-closed American Scharffen Berger chocolate plant line (the whole thing) and Nestlé’s shuttered chocolate facility in Fulton, N.Y.
At this point, Preston put me in the hands of his master chocolatier, Damion Badalamenti, who ran me through their production process. We started next to two great rolling buckets loaded with whole cacao beans that were roasted that morning. With Badalamenti’s permission, I popped one in my mouth, revealing the bean’s crunchy, earthy and occasionally barnyard-y characteristics. Underneath it all, there were hints of the final product and I grabbed more from the bucket and scarfed them whenever he turned his back.
The beans were run through a “cracker” to crush them, a separator to sift out nibs of the right size, and then the vortex winnower to remove the skin. The nibs passed through a first grinder known as a mélangeur and a second where sugar and cocoa butter were added, creating a sort of rough-textured hot chocolate of the gods, with a toasty acidity most mortals would clamber over one another to taste.
After aging for a top-secret amount of time, the mixture was cooled and mixed in a machine that diminishes the size of the chocolate crystals, until it reached the shiny, optimal condition known to chefs and chocoholics as the “fifth state.”
Incidentally, the sixth state is seen in the odd, mottled and pale-colored chocolate bar that has suffered poor storage and likely been melted and reconstituted inside the wrapper.
This was their baby: smooth and acidic, dark and pleasingly bitter.
Their chocolates include 72 percent cacao squares, 66 percent bars and bonbons laced with the liquor that is made in the adjacent room. This is big-league chocolate that could go toe to toe with a European rival, and it is the alcohol that is Preston’s final spinoff.
To create a line of cacao-based rums and chocolate liquors, Preston takes the residual wine from the cacao fermentation process and runs it through a still. He began with a 1-liter rotary evaporator coveted by high-end bartenders and chefs favoring molecular gastronomy, then moved on to a 50-liter version he designed himself before moving on to a German-built 1,000-liter copper still — tied with New York Distilling Company’s for the title of largest in the state — and waiting to be fired up as soon as the labels for his liquor bottles are government-approved.
Preston is hoping to have the still fired up by Labor Day. Preston refers to most other cacao-based liquors as “Yoo-hoo with neutral spirit,” but his version, aged for a year with American oak, smells of pure cacao nibs and is liquid chocolate in the mouth. Botanica’s signature drink is 3 ounces of the liquor shaken with three raspberries that bring out its earthiness: a liquid bonbon for grownups.
Preston headed back to his office, and I asked how long a lifetime career-switcher would stay with such a project. He appeared surprised by his own response.
“Who knows?” he said. “So far it’s held my attention.”
I arched an eyebrow, checked on clearing my schedule and called back.
“The guy designed one of those James Bond-style jet packs. That’s all I know. This is New York — are you coming or not?”
How do you say no? I hailed a cab and headed to Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, ending up in an empty bar where a man in a bowler hat poured a mean whiskey-based drink called a Blood and Sand. Nearby rooms, which have just been unveiled, house both one of the largest distilling apparatuses in New York state and a serious-looking chocolate manufacturing line. The whole complex is called Cacao Prieto.
The project is the brainchild of Daniel Preston, 40, a man of many brainchildren.
At 18, he started a glass company that improved neon sign electrodes. Later, he founded an aerospace company that worked for NASA and the Department of Defense. Now, his life is chocolate.
“The last grade I officially graduated from was fifth,” said Preston, who began unsuccessfully dabbling with college at age 12 and estimates the number of patents he holds at “about 100.”
Preston designed custom light bulbs and was flown around the world to design automating machines and assembly lines, ending up working on a gig with the European nuclear research organization, CERN. Soon after, he received a call from an American government agency he’d never heard of telling him he was in trouble for designing something that qualified as a nuclear trigger.
Unfazed and found innocent, Preston’s firm got a new gig, this time with PerkinElmer, the analytical equipment mega-corporation brought in to investigate the CERN case. PerkinElmer bought Preston Glass for a hefty sum.
“All of a sudden, I had nothing to do, so I took up skydiving,” he says. He eventually racked up thousands of jumps, but ended up breaking his C-6 vertebrae due to a design defect in one particular chute. His response? “I started making parachutes.”
His parachute project became Atair Aerospace, which broke records for the smallest chute that could be landed by a person and longest drift ratio (the run versus the rise of a jump).
Eventually, Preston went after bigger guns, winning grants from the Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program, as well as the Army, Navy and NASA, running projects like designing wheeled and winged vehicles with two-day autonomy, coming up with satellite-guided parachutes and creating algorithms to drop a “swarm” of parachutes, each loaded with military supplies, to a precise point on the ground. The math for the latter was “based on the way starlings flock.”
The jet pack story makes its way in here. Originally a winged suit he “designed for fun,” he wore it into the DARPA offices where, “they paid me to put turbines on it.”
Preston was bought out again in 2009 by William E. Conway Jr., founder of the Carlyle Group, and the agreement came with a five-year non-compete clause.
Again, all of a sudden, Preston had some free time on his hands. This time he turned to the bottle, opening the Red Hook bar Botanica in the summer of 2009 to highlight herbal liquors, especially those from northern Italy. He modeled the bar’s design on the bar at Hotel Gritti Palace in Venice.
The New York City-born Preston also reconnected with his family in the Dominican Republic, noting that the great farms his family owned and barely held onto through a revolution and civil war in 1965 were eventually whittled down to a couple of small cacao plantations used mostly for ecotourism.
He was captivated by the plantations, explaining the otherworldly colors and peculiar sprouting capabilities of the cacao plants as if describing a scene from the jungles of “Avatar.”
As a scientist and a bit of a neat freak, however, he was driven bonkers by the fermentation process typically used in the Dominican Republic, where cacao pods are essentially left on the ground or in bags for days.
“You wouldn’t find a winemaker who’d thrown his grapes down in the field, stomp them right there and come back in a week hoping it all tastes good,” he said, wide-eyed with exasperation. “This is the process that makes chocolate taste like chocolate, but people have left it entirely up to chance.”
“As a scientist, I want to control variables, but nobody cared. The farmers just wanted disease resistance and high yields. The nursery didn’t care what the root stock was as long as it grew. It goes on an on — there’s no alignment of interest,” he says. “So we decided to do it all ourselves.”
For the fermentation, that meant cracking the cacao pods into stainless steel fermenters and experimenting with different yeasts, controlling inoculations to create different flavor profiles.
“By choosing the ‘bugs,’” he said, referring to the yeast, “you can drastically influence the flavors coming out of the beans.”
Food traditionalists might shudder at the thought of stripping the romance from the production process, but Preston leans toward the scientific.
“We try to control everything,” he said. “It’s only called an art when you don’t know what you’re doing.”
As he got further into the process, side industries began popping up like well-tended plants in a Dominican hothouse.
Preston started Cacao Biotechnologies, a company that bills itself as the “world’s preeminent expert on cacao biotechnologies and genetics,” which, among other things, creates cacao strains for the chocolate industry and phytonutrients for pharmaceutical companies. Or, as he mentions in an aside, “we sequenced the genome of cacao.”
In addition, Preston saw a need for production equipment geared for the rising numbers of artisanal producers. The only equipment out there not made for giant corporations was flimsy stuff made for hobbyists.
Calling on his industrial and aeronautical past, Preston began designing, building and selling his own machines to fill that need. On the Cacao Prieto plant floor, his “vortex winnower” is a glamorous-looking cousin to the vacuum cleaner that separates the skin from roast cacao nibs. On a computer in his office, there’s a design for a new style of bean roaster that looks like a chest-high, vertically mounted jet engine. The “vortex roaster” roasts beans — as they float on a cushion of hot air.
Some of the other equipment on the line includes parts from the now-closed American Scharffen Berger chocolate plant line (the whole thing) and Nestlé’s shuttered chocolate facility in Fulton, N.Y.
At this point, Preston put me in the hands of his master chocolatier, Damion Badalamenti, who ran me through their production process. We started next to two great rolling buckets loaded with whole cacao beans that were roasted that morning. With Badalamenti’s permission, I popped one in my mouth, revealing the bean’s crunchy, earthy and occasionally barnyard-y characteristics. Underneath it all, there were hints of the final product and I grabbed more from the bucket and scarfed them whenever he turned his back.
The beans were run through a “cracker” to crush them, a separator to sift out nibs of the right size, and then the vortex winnower to remove the skin. The nibs passed through a first grinder known as a mélangeur and a second where sugar and cocoa butter were added, creating a sort of rough-textured hot chocolate of the gods, with a toasty acidity most mortals would clamber over one another to taste.
After aging for a top-secret amount of time, the mixture was cooled and mixed in a machine that diminishes the size of the chocolate crystals, until it reached the shiny, optimal condition known to chefs and chocoholics as the “fifth state.”
Incidentally, the sixth state is seen in the odd, mottled and pale-colored chocolate bar that has suffered poor storage and likely been melted and reconstituted inside the wrapper.
This was their baby: smooth and acidic, dark and pleasingly bitter.
Their chocolates include 72 percent cacao squares, 66 percent bars and bonbons laced with the liquor that is made in the adjacent room. This is big-league chocolate that could go toe to toe with a European rival, and it is the alcohol that is Preston’s final spinoff.
To create a line of cacao-based rums and chocolate liquors, Preston takes the residual wine from the cacao fermentation process and runs it through a still. He began with a 1-liter rotary evaporator coveted by high-end bartenders and chefs favoring molecular gastronomy, then moved on to a 50-liter version he designed himself before moving on to a German-built 1,000-liter copper still — tied with New York Distilling Company’s for the title of largest in the state — and waiting to be fired up as soon as the labels for his liquor bottles are government-approved.
Preston is hoping to have the still fired up by Labor Day. Preston refers to most other cacao-based liquors as “Yoo-hoo with neutral spirit,” but his version, aged for a year with American oak, smells of pure cacao nibs and is liquid chocolate in the mouth. Botanica’s signature drink is 3 ounces of the liquor shaken with three raspberries that bring out its earthiness: a liquid bonbon for grownups.
Preston headed back to his office, and I asked how long a lifetime career-switcher would stay with such a project. He appeared surprised by his own response.
“Who knows?” he said. “So far it’s held my attention.”
PHOTO: Clockwise from top right: Joe Ray for The Daily (4), Courtesy of Cacao Prieto
Clockwise, from top left: Raw cacao pods sit atop processed cacao seeds; chocolatier Damion Badalamenti uses the Preston-designed “vortex winnower”; a plateful of Cacao Prieto’s finished product; and the cocoa-crazy headquarters in Brooklyn.
PHOTO: Clockwise from right: Joe Ray for The Daily, Courtesy of Cacao Prieto (3)
Clockwise, from bottom left: A Preston-designed suit on display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art; Preston tests a suit in a wind tunnel; wings that he designed; and the master presiding over his chocolate factory.
