help building my own cocoa butter press

[mark]

I realize this is an old discussion and hopefully most of you have found solutions to your cocoa butter challenge. I just wanted to add a note for future craft chocolatiers.

You can now purchase machinery to extract cocoa butter from the same beans you make chocolate with, for about $200. I have been using our machine for about a year and have run a few hundred pounds of beans through it without problems. To get this low end machine, go to Alibaba and search for "DL-ZYJ02". You can search for cocoa butter presses, but most of them are high capacity, high dollar while some of the matches are not really cocoa butter extractors (even though they substitute the cocoa butter term into the product name, to match your search).

The drawbacks of this low end machine:
Maxes out at about 2 Kg beans per hour.
The butter is not pure, but it is more than adequate for chocolate making. It contains some solid, so it is brown rather than cream colored. It is, however, a very high percent of butter.

We have used this machine to practice our craft and treat our customers to some very good chocolate, but I am now looking into upgrading to $900 machine with much higher capacity.

[lyndon]

Has anyone ever tried anything like this? www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00O60PJLA/ (It's a hand powered screw)

It lists cocoa beans as one of the things it can extract oil from

[mark]

I've seen that one on Alibaba, for quite a bit less, maybe $75 USD. I have not seen them in action. I bought an electric butter press for about $200 USD last year. It comes with a heating element, which gets to just over 150C, but only at the end of the press. The rest of the tube is heated to a lesser extent. The thing is, the heat helps to melt and express cocoa butter which is solid at room temperature. I see some kind of bottle underneath the tube on that manual press, perhaps some kind of alcohol burn?

[lyndon]

I guess I could rig something up to heat it, but I was more thinking would something like this simply lack the power to create enough pressure? Would just be good to know i anyone has any first hand experience. Of course $200 for one like you have is totally affordable, but if I can do something without electricity, I prefer to.

[mark]

This is the one we've used for almost a year now. It's not perfect. The cocoa butter is not real "pure", it has some cocoa solids in it that darken it. If you only intend on making chocolate with the butter, it's fine. If you need creamy yellow cocoa butter, you will need to spend a lot more:

www.alibaba.com/product-detail/High-quality-DL-ZYJ02-Traditional-mini_1341961132.html

I was way off on the price of the hand crank machine you found. Here it is on Alibaba, maybe 154 Pounds is not a terrible price but you might get the crank for as little as $90USD:

www.alibaba.com/product-detail/reasonable-price-cocoa-oil-press-machine_1290077264.html

I like the idea of not using electricity also, but the first machine is only 200W and if you're going to make chocolate for sale, you will want something that does not require hours of hand cranking. If you just want the satisfaction of making your own chocolate to consume at home or give to friends, the hand crank seems a little more, uhh, nostalgic?

The long handle on that crank makes me believe that you would have sufficient torque to press butter. The screw press design maximizes leverage to crush any oil bearing seeds you can throw at it. The little $200 electric machine above is pretty amazing considering that the first cocoa butter machine I found cost $30K USD. It only processes 2Kg/hour, but it is adequate for our needs right now.

[lyndon]

Cool, obviously the main goal is to get cocoa butter to use in my chocolate for a more truer single origin, but of course I'm then left with cocoa solids. Do you find yours is dry enough for cocoa powder with the machine you have?

[mark]

Yes, absolutely I use the solids to make powder. The challenge is getting it fine enough. Without some $500+ investment in a small hammer mill, you won't get it fine enough for drinks. However, you can bake with it. I make some mean brownies with the powder.

[timwilde]

something that crossed my mind the other day as I was walking through Harbor Freight.

www.harborfreight.com/20-ton-shop-press-32879.html?ccdenc=eyJjb2RlIjoiNzQzMDYzNTEiLCJza3UiOiIzMjg3OSIsImlzIjoiMTU0Ljk5IiwicHJvZHVjdF9p%0D%0AZCI6IjQ1MyJ9%0D%0A

Unless I'm missing something, all that you'd need to get this working as a cocoa butter press is a piston and perforated cylinder. Both of which I'm told my my metal guy would be very easy and cheap to get done. Anyone go this route before? Or am I missing some engineering feat that I'm not thinking about to get this done right?

Also curious, if you're pressing cocoa butter, do you need to roast/crack/winnow as normal? I'd assume that'd be a yes but figured I'd ask anyway.  

[Ben]

What you describe is essentially what Grenada does. Here's a photo of one of their cocoa butter presses:

www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://appropriatetechnology.wikispaces.com/file/view/Grenada%252520Cocoa%252520Press.jpg/485427124/Grenada%252520Cocoa%252520Press.jpg&imgrefurl=http://appropriatetechnology.wikispaces.com/Cocoa%2BButter%2BPress&h=384&w=288&tbnid=ZOA-qY-bKkn-mM:&zoom=1&docid=Vi6en57kH9lIjM&ei=vwksVbDVNfeHsQSjtoHQBA&tbm=isch&ved=0CB0QMygAMAA

I believe that's the original press they built, that I think (from looking at photos online) has since been replaced.

[mark]

Yes, we roast, crack and winnow before we press butter.

As far as the piston and perforated cylinder goes, you might look at Cacao Cocina's machine to see what is involved. It looks like some wire mesh with a lot of reinforcement, maybe some cheesecloth and a tight fit. The chocolate liquor needs to be well ground and liquid (above butter melting temp). I have looked into getting that whole getup built here, but even for a cast iron cylinder/piston, it was going to be $400. Steel would have been much higher. When I looked at the burst pressure of cast iron it was too low, so I looked at alternatives and found the screw press machines.

[mark]

We bought a cocoa butter press a few years back. It's a heavy beast, 900 pounds, but it does the job. You can safely get it to 7000psi, but we're still only pressing about 2 pounds of butter out of 5 pounds of liquor. I don't know how much more could be pressed with more pressure, but I know that there should be about 2.5-2.6 pounds of butter in 5 pounds of cocoa. By the time the machine was imported, port fees paid, and taxes, we spent $3000.

Before that we had a screw press, which works alright if you just need butter and you don't mind that it's brown. It has some cocoa solids in it, but mostly pure. You can't use the butter for white chocolate, and the solids pressed out aren't fine enough to sell as cocoa powder, even after running it through a high speed grinder. Still, it's a nice entry level option at around $300.

[spicazo]

Hey, so near where I live there's a significant winemaking industry and they use hydraulic presses to squeeze grapes. Is there any reason this would not work for cacao liqeuer? The only problem I can think of is that they use a perforated drum rather than a solid cilinder, but I imagine if kept in bags for pressing it woul work.

If so I could get one for a decent price.