Quetzal Cacao

Inicio
Panama
La Concepción
Quetzal Cacao

Llamar Cómo llegar Página web Contactar con la empresa

Delectable, two-ingredient, luxury chocolate. Hand crafted in Panama from our finest organic cacao.

13/10/2026

Only 20 Christmas Boxes will be made at Quetzal Cacao this year, filled with the handmade confections we've come to love sharing during the holidays.

And our beloved peppermint patties are returning!

🎄 The Holiday Waitlist gets first access to reservations. If you'd love a Christmas Box for your own table or as a special gift, you can join here:

https://lynbishop.com/holiday-waitlist

This tradition began long before there was a chocolate farm.

Back in 2014, I started baking Christmas cookies for friends and neighbors here in Panama. When I founded Quetzal Cacao in 2019, chocolate gradually found its way into that tradition, and those Christmas cookies became part of a whole collection of handmade treats.

Every year, some favorites return, alongside new additions inspired by what's growing on the farm and what we're making in the kitchen.

Our peppermint patties are one of those returning favorites. They're a labor of love to craft by hand, and I wouldn't dream of leaving them out.

This year's box will bring together bonbons, Confit de Cacao, English toffee, peppermint patties, chocolate turtles, brownie bites, Christmas cookies, and more!

I love imagining The Christmas Box coming out with afternoon coffee, being passed around after dinner so everyone can choose a few bites, or finding its way to someone special as a gift.

The Christmas Box is $62, including delivery within Panama. We're making just 20, and everyone on our Holiday Waitlist will receive the first invitation to reserve one.

🎄 Join the Holiday Waitlist:
https://lynbishop.com/holiday-waitlist

Which Christmas confection do you always look forward to?

13/10/2026

For sixteen years, I've lived and worked on our regenerative cacao farm in Chiriquí, Panama, without ever seeing a collared peccary. Then, this month, our Bushnell trail camera captured something wonderful.

These wild, pig-like animals are part of a family group that sometimes numbers as many as fourteen. They're moving along the upper edge of our two-hectare wildlife corridor, a piece of jungle we've deliberately preserved for the wild creatures who share this land with us.

Beyond our estate are cattle pastures and cultivated fields. Here, we've chosen a different approach. We grow cacao and make chocolate, but we also believe that caring for the land means protecting space for the lives that depend on it.

These brief encounters remind me that a great deal happens in the forest when we're not watching.

Welcome to Quetzal Cacao, our regenerative, tree-to-bar chocolate farm in the highlands of Panama, where growing cacao and caring for the natural world go hand in hand.

12/10/2026

There's an ingredient in my brownies that most people associate with cocktails.

It's Hot Xoco Bitters, one of the bottles I keep in our botanical pantry here on the farm in Panama.

Made with cacao nibs, citrus peel, aromatic herbs, warming spices, and a touch of pepper, these bitters are wonderful in hot chocolate and brownies. Sometimes I use them in place of vanilla when I want to bring a little more depth and spice to the chocolate.

I've always enjoyed finding new ways to use the things we make here on the farm, and bitters have become one of my favorite ingredients to experiment with in the kitchen.

Hot Xoco is one of six finished bitters available in our Simply Good catalog this week, alongside Rootbeer, Hibiscus, Three Queens, Tropical, and Spicy Xoco. Each 1 oz bottle is $15.

Today is the last day to order before our travel break. Orders close Monday, October 12, at 5 PM, with overnight shipping Thursday to Fletes Chavales and Uno Express pickup locations across Panama.

You'll also find fresh harvests, preserves, and other provisions from our regenerative farm in the Simply Good catalog.

https://lynbishop.com/catalog

What's the most unexpected ingredient you've ever added to your brownies?

11/10/2026

I found a blue morpho butterfly resting on a cacao leaf on our regenerative estate in Panama. With its wings folded, it looked so much like a dried leaf or a piece of wood that you could easily miss it. 
These beautiful butterflies are native to the tropical forests of Central and South America. Adults often feed on the juices of fallen, overripe fruit, and our shaded cacao groves offer some of the same shelter and humidity they find in the forest. 
I followed this one through the grove for a while, watching that astonishing metallic blue flash whenever it took flight. I love that something so brilliantly colored can also be so beautifully camouflaged. 
And here’s something wonderful. The blue isn’t actually a pigment. It comes from microscopic structures on the wings that reflect light, creating that extraordinary metallic shimmer. 
Have you ever seen a blue morpho in flight?

08/10/2026

It’s Day 6 of this week’s 90-pound cacao ferment, and today I wanted to look inside the beans.   From the outside, you can only tell so much. Cutting them open lets me see how the fermentation has moved through the bean and whether the internal separation is developing the way I expect.   This is one of the important checks that happens long before cacao ever  becomes chocolate.  If you have ever wondered what I am looking for inside a fermented cacao bean, this is a good place to start.   What part of fermentation would you like me to show you next?

07/10/2026

This is what the final stretch of a collection looks like here.

The October bars are coming out of their molds now, and the table is beginning to fill.

Up until this point, much of the work has lived in tasting, adjusting, making decisions, and trying again.

Then there comes a day when you begin lifting finished bars from the molds one after another, and the collection becomes something you can finally hold in your hands.

We are nearly there with October. The next Quetzal’s Chocolate Club collection leaves the farm on October 14.

I never quite lose my affection for this stage of the work.

If you enjoy seeing what happens behind the finished chocolate, what part of the process would you most like me to show you?

06/10/2026

If you were here on the farm this week, you could see several years of cacao life happening almost within the same walk.

In the fermentary, a fresh batch is changing every day. The beans that began pale and creamy are moving through maroon, red, and brown, and the sweet fruit aroma is giving way to the sharper smell of vinegar as the fermentation develops.

From there, you could walk into the chocolate kitchen and find the October collection nearly finished for next week’s Chocolate Club drop, while boxes for our U.S. Concierge members are beginning to come together for their journey later this month.

And then, outside in the grove, there are 100 new cacao seedlings already in the ground, with more planting places being marked.

I think this is one of the things that can be hard to see when we meet cacao only as a finished piece of chocolate. So much time sits behind it, and so many different moments in the life of the tree are happening long before anything reaches your hand.

Right now we happen to be able to see several of those moments at once, from beans only days removed from the pod to chocolate almost ready to be shared, while young trees are beginning a journey that will take years.

It makes me curious about what part of that long journey you would most like to come closer to. Is it growing cacao, fermentation, making the chocolate, or tasting what all of that work eventually becomes?

02/10/2026

We are planting 300 new cacao trees at Finca Las Heliconias, while helping another grower begin his own cacao planting in Santa Catalina.

The bamboo markers are going in here on the farm. Some seedlings are already in the ground, and others are still waiting their turn.

I recently spent two days in Santa Catalina walking another grower’s property with him, looking at what was already growing, the conditions of the land, and where cacao might fit. Afterwards, I put together a detailed report so he could move forward with more confidence about what to plant, where to plant it, and what the land would need from him.

After years of growing cacao at Finca Las Heliconias and turning those harvests into chocolate through Quetzal Cacao, learning through our own mistakes, pruning cycles, fermentations, and changing seasons, something is beginning to shift.

We are beginning to share some of what we have learned with other growers.

This weekend, a small group of cacao producers and PhD students will sit down together here to talk about what it would take to help growers in Chiriquí and along Panama’s Pacific side improve post-harvest practices and move closer to the quality standards used by Cacao of Excellence.

As I walk past those bamboo markers and young trees waiting to be planted, I keep thinking about how much of good cacao is decided long before there is ever a chocolate bar.

It begins with understanding the land, making better decisions early, and sharing what we learn as we go.

If you grow cacao in Panama, work with producers, or are involved in post-harvest cacao here, I’d be glad to hear what you are seeing in your region. Leave a comment or send me a note.

01/10/2026

One of October’s chocolate bars began with a failed corn harvest.

Our own corn did not pollinate this season, so when we went to harvest there were not enough mature kernels to work with.

I did not want to replace it with just any corn. If an ingredient is going into a Quetzal Cacao bar, I want to know how it was grown, what variety it is, and who grew it. I wanted corn grown cleanly, from good seed, by a farmer whose work I could trust.

That is when I reached out to Rodrigo, one of our newest Chocolate Club members and a farmer in Cambutal, Panama.

He sent me four cups of his fresh maíz nuevo, the tender new corn harvested at the beginning of the season.

That corn became the starting point for this experiment.

First came the KOZO ferment, where the corn sat with cane sugar and slowly released its flavor into syrup.

Then that syrup became caramel.

And now the caramel is inside our first test bar for Maíz de Abuela, one of the chocolates in our October collection.

This is how some of our chocolates take shape. We begin with what is in season, work with ingredients we trust, and test until we know whether the idea deserves a place in the collection.

Rodrigo farms at in Cambutal, growing with the kind of care and integrity that made me comfortable putting his corn into a Quetzal Cacao bar. Stop in and say hello.

If this is the kind of chocolate you want to taste, the ones shaped by the season, the farm, and the people growing the ingredients, join Quetzal’s Chocolate Club waitlist: lynbishop.com/chocolate-club-waitlist

30/09/2026

This golden liquid is fresh cacao nectar.

I poured it off this morning from the fermentation we started yesterday with 90 pounds of wet cacao fruit, what we call baba here on the farm.

Day one always gives us the most delicious nectar. It drains naturally from the sweet pulp surrounding the cacao beans as fermentation begins, and this is only part of what we collected.

At the beginning of this year, most of our fermentations were under 30 pounds.
Now they can be four times that size.

Our last fermentation began with 135 pounds of wet baba and finished as 48 pounds of dried cacao beans.
That growth sounds simple until you are the one responsible for the flavor.

A 30-pound fermentation does not behave like a 135-pound one. The heat builds differently. The timing shifts. What we thought we knew about when to turn the beans, when to stop the ferment, and how to roast afterward is being tested again.

The trees and the farm are the same, but the scale has changed, and suddenly we are learning this cacao again.

That is one of the things I find most interesting about growing cacao. Producing more does not simply mean making more chocolate. Sometimes it means becoming a student of your own farm all over again.

And meanwhile, there is this beautiful bottle of fresh cacao nectar sitting in the kitchen.

What would you do with it?

Dirección

Sortova
La Concepción

Teléfono

+50765214464

Página web

http://lynbishop.com/chocolate-club

Notificaciones

Sea el primero en enterarse: le enviaremos un correo electrónico cuando Quetzal Cacao publique novedades y promociones. Su dirección de correo electrónico no se utilizará para ningún otro fin y puede darse de baja en cualquier momento.