In this episode of Ayahuasca Podcast, host Sam Believ (founder of http://www.lawayra.com) has a conversation with , founder of . Based in Colombia, Danielle has spent over a decade working closely with Indigenous communities to produce ethically sourced, high-quality ceremonial cacao. Her work bridges traditional knowledge, sustainability, and modern processing while supporting local farmers and regenerative practices.
We touch upon topics of:
- Danielle’s first Aya experiences and how they led her to cacao (02:00–05:30)
- Building Origin Cacao with Indigenous communities in Colombia (06:00–11:00)
- Cacao as a daily connection practice vs ceremonial use (13:00–20:30)
- Cacao as an integration tool after Aya ceremonies (21:00–26:30)
- Ethics, sourcing, and avoiding exploitative cacao industries (29:00–32:30)
- Fermentation, roasting, and why “raw cacao” is a myth (55:00–58:30)
- Replacing coca crops with cacao and Colombia’s agricultural future (38:30–44:30)
If you would like to attend one of our Ayahuasca retreats go to http://www.lawayra.com
Find more about Danielle de Kisere and her work at origencacao.com and on Instagram @origencacao.
Transcript
Sam Believ: You’re listening to ayahuasca podcast.com.
Danielle de Kisere: There are so many ways that cacao can be beneficial, whether it’s spiritual or emotional or just physical with the properties, all the vitamins and nutrients, antioxidants, there are so many ways that people can choose to drink cacao. You don’t have to be on a spiritual mission every day.
Sam Believ: So I just realized I’ve been lying to people because I thought that the difference between the ceremonial cacao and the store-bought cacao is the type of the bean.
Danielle de Kisere: If you have something that tastes anything like chocolate, it’s not raw and there’s no possible way for it to be raw. There’s a lot of people that tell you that, ah, no.
The ceremonial caca should be harsh as you straw, but if you don’t like to drink it, then you’re not gonna drink it.
Sam Believ: You talk about Columbia government replacing Coke. Cow plantations with cacao plantations.
Danielle de Kisere: God forbid you buy cacao from Africa, where still 80% of the labor that works in the cacao fields in Africa is slave labor and child labor.
Sam Believ: Hi guys, and welcome to Ayahuasca podcast, as always with the host. And today I’m having a conversation with Dan. Dick is here. Yeah, Danielle is the founder of Origin Cacao. We’re right here at her farm. Some of you the come to Lare, you’ve been participating cacao ceremonies last six months or so, and it’s been done with cacao from Danielle’s Farm.
So I’m here at the Source and we are gonna talk about cacao today. This episode is sponsored by Lara Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Laira, connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you. Dan, welcome to the show.
Danielle de Kisere: Thank you so much.
Sam Believ: Dan, tell us Kate is your sort of final stop when you participated in other medicine traditions before.
Tell us your story of where were you before and then how did you find the medicines and how did you end up working with your Cal?
Danielle de Kisere: I came to Columbia in 2014. I didn’t know anything about the medicine or any medicines or anything like that. I had, was in a transitional point of my life and I had just come here for a short vacation.
But then I decided to stay, I ended up going to an Ayahuasca ceremony. Just by pure accident I met some woman on the plane who said that I needed to go to INE because it was the most beautiful city in Columbia. I was staying in Santa Marta. And and so I just Google search what to do in Met Jean.
And a little article came up about an ayahuasca ceremony and huh, that sounds interesting. Maybe it might help me. And I went and it was absolutely terrible. It was the most ridiculous thing. I couldn’t believe that I paid Lenny to go. It was, I think it was only like 20 bucks.
Yeah. But it was up in, in the mountains and it was so cold and, I didn’t really speak much Spanish at the time. And when I arrived the Titan gave me a tobacco purge. So he just put this like golf ball, size of tobacco in my mouth with his dirty fingers. And I just really sick from that.
And I didn’t really feel the medicine and it was freezing cold. And I’m like why? I can’t believe I paid money to do this? Like, why do people do this? It’s ridiculous. And so I went back to Santa Mar to do my thing and one of the girls that I had met at ceremony, she was also from the us she came to visit me out there.
She’s oh no, but it’s really great. You need to try again. I’m like, I don’t think so. She’s no, you just try again. So I went back and I went to go find the organizer and I told him that I wanted to thank the lady who was singing at the last ceremony. That it was the really the only beautiful thing that I experienced the whole time.
There was some love and singing and it was really super beautiful. He is like. What are you talking about there? We don’t have a female singer. There was nobody singing that night. So I had I had spent the whole night thinking that absolutely no effects from the medicine and nothing happened to me.
And and turns out something did happen. And then that night turned out to be really beautiful. So I kept going back and then I stayed in Columbia and been working with medicine ever since. As far as cacao, when I had decided to stay in Columbia I figured I needed something to do besides drink medicine, that if I was gonna stay here and live here I should do something.
And my mother had asked me at one point to send her back some chocolate. She had heard that Columbia made great chocolates and I couldn’t find any. It turns out nobody in Columbia was actually making good. Chocolate bean to bar chocolate, ceremonial cacao, nothing. There was nothing nothing happening here in, in that sense.
And so I started to learn how to make chocolate and and
Sam Believ: it’s okay. It is a dog saying it is funny.
Danielle de Kisere: So I started learning about chocolate and started, kept working with the medicine and learning about, the plant medicines and that. And had one of my ceremonies I met as Dils who is from the ar waku tribe.
And we started talking a lot. And turns out he had a cacao farm in the Sierra Nevada on the ar waku reservation. And so he sent me some cacao. To see how it turned into chocolate. That’s violet. And so he sent me 50 kilos of cacao and it was absolutely terrible. Absolutely terrible.
They, at that point nobody in the Sierra Nevada really knew how to ferment cacao properly or what to do with the cacao. They just dried it and sent it off and and so I showed him what went wrong and so he went back and tried again and learned some more, and we tried again and it was still terrible.
And anyways, I think that went on for about a year of, every couple months he would try a different technique and, eventually we started getting some good cacao from them, and his wife was here with their kids, and she started coming over to our little tiny factory learning how to make, how to process the cacao.
And and so once we finally had a really beautifully tasting cacao that was coming from their farm, I, I thought, what better to do with it than to share it for ceremonial cacao? Because at that time, this was like 10 years ago, there still wasn’t a lot of ceremonial cacao in the world.
It was a new thing. There wasn’t really that many options in the world. And, to have beautiful, organic cacao grown in a spiritual way I really wanted to share that. So I started trying to put that out there and nobody really knew what it was. And the beginning, I just had to keep giving it away and giving it to people that I thought might know what to do with it.
And we started. Just kept growing from there and I eventually started finding ways to sell it in the world. And and yeah. And now we export about, I dunno, a thousand pounds a month. A thousand pounds. Yeah. And
Sam Believ: I think at least 20 of those go to lower Earth.
Danielle de Kisere: Yeah. It goes all over the world.
We export to the us, Australia, England, the Europe. So we’ve really developed quite a beautiful community of people that love our cacao a lot. And we now started working with a few other regions. We have cacao from Put Mayo, which is grown by the India community there really beautiful project they have.
And of course. We have our own cacao here at our new farm, which I’ve been really trying to spend about two years. We’ve been working on really developing the cacao we have here, and I’ve just started offering that. Yeah it’s really a beautiful project and it’s been really interesting to see and learn just how much our cacao really touches people in the world.
Whether it’s for ceremonies or ceremonies that people organize or just people that use it on a daily basis as a way to connect every day. So it’s really a project that I’m quite proud of in that sense. And the work that we have done with the indigenous has been really great.
The this back and forth, this year long learning process with, as he has. 17 brothers and sisters. And his wife has 14 brothers and sisters. And so the knowledge that they learned, they shared with their family, which then gets shared with their greater community. And now we’re really getting a lot of really good cacao coming out of the Sierra Nevada.
And of course, I’m not the only one to give credit to that. There’s been a few people that have really worked hard sharing the Sierra Nevada cacao with the world, and they have won a lot of awards. But it’s this sharing of knowledge that really is what changes the world. When somebody learns something and this improves their lives, now they can, now they’re making about twice as much perb of kilo that they used to make when they didn’t know how to ferment it. That’s what we’re to. Trying to do a little bit in Tamayo. They’re still new to Cacao and Tamayo and we’re still in a little bit of a learning curve, but it’s a beautiful project to really help the people on the Inga reservation there with their empowering them to, to have a a way of of improving their lives through through bigger earnings. So
Sam Believ: Okay. Thank you for sharing your story. So I see a lot of patterns, like synchronicity. You weren’t really looking for it then I was cofound you and then it’s kinda like my story and many people that I interview, it’s just, it just happens to you Yeah. For various reasons.
And yeah, the Colombian style ceremony is. Can be very shocking for new people. It’s you come and here’s your cup and sometimes it’s uncomfortable and you don’t really have the medicine. So that’s what we’re trying to combat at LA Wire and make it comfortable, especially for the first time or so when drink the medicine.
Don’t get this care experience. But I’m glad you persisted and you had a beautiful experience eventually. And the story about not feeling connection and then figuring out that there was connection all along, that’s very common because we have it all the time. People drink to medicine and they say yeah, nothing really happened.
And then they go ahead and describe a perfect, hadn’t described a perfect DI experience. I felt this and I felt this, and I cried and I purged. But it’s I did not connect because it’s just not what they expected. So let’s talk about caca, right? Because that’s your specialty. You said that, people reach out to you and they tell you how cacaos change their lives either in the working with it individually or in a group setting. So tell us about this, what is cacaos effect on people’s healing and growth journey? What is the role of this medicine in this lab?
Danielle de Kisere: Cacao is really a very, it’s certainly a more subtle medicine as compared to ayahuasca. It doesn’t really quite, do that, but I think it’s a really beautiful medicine that can be many things to many people. It can you know what it’s really known for, because it has theo bro wine and the polyphenols and all these things that help elevate your mood.
It also works with your cardiovascular system. And, so these two in combination can be a really powerful way to open up your heart space, open up your emotional space, help get the blood flowing in all of your body to, to really help move some energies around. If you wanna have it in a ceremonial or in a spiritual way, this can be a really beautiful way to open up all of those possibilities.
So if you have a cacao ceremony and you share music and song, and then you know, also open up and share thoughts and feelings, this can be really a way to help people that might not. Be able to do that on a regular basis for themselves. For me I like to drink the cacao and just as a way to connect every day.
I don’t drink. A lot of people ask me if I drink cacao every day and I don’t. We have tons of cacao. We have 5,000 cacao trees here. Every day I get up in my office and I look at the cacao trees, which are right behind us. And I feel like my whole life is cacao and that energy.
But if I do drink it, it’s, I find it’s a really great way to just ground in and connect. And I think that’s something that most folks are missing in life. Hello Norman.
Sam Believ: He is quite loud is all,
Danielle de Kisere: but those are not
Sam Believ: watching the video. It’s his big dog,
Danielle de Kisere: big ginormous white dog named Norman.
Cacao can really help keep us connected. And I think that’s the thing that most people are really missing in life is connection. Whether it’s to nature, whether that’s to one another, whether or not that’s to God the universe, source, whatever you wanna call it. I feel that this connection is what really has most of the world feeling lost.
So whether you can find that connection every day in your yoga practice or in your meditation practice, or in your medicine work, working with ayahuasca or mushrooms or in a daily practice of cacao. Sorry, I’m so worried that they’re gonna knock over your little stand. No,
Sam Believ: it’s okay.
Danielle de Kisere: It’s, it is that time of day that they get frisky.
Sam Believ: Yeah they see that you’re here and you’re watching, so they’re. They want that attention, I think we can go, the microphone will still pick up. So guys, if you’re hearing some other sounds, it’s the two dogs, they have their daily ritual of blood and slash fighting.
So
Danielle de Kisere: yeah, it’s carry on. There’s no editing I guess, of this, huh?
Sam Believ: Yeah, I can’t remove that, the background noise.
Danielle de Kisere: I really feel that if people were able to find this connection on a daily basis, that the world would be in such a more beautiful place and we as individuals wouldn’t feel so, so depressed, so lonely, so lost because that is, I think the, one of the biggest problems that most people face.
All the anger in the world, all the frustration, all the, the, all these things all stem from the same thing as well. And I don’t think we really need to, put it on anyone? What what form that they find this connection in. A lot of people find that with their yoga practice, a lot of people find this with their meditation practice.
A lot of people use both of these things. And
sorry.
Sam Believ: Some find it through playing play in front. Yeah.
Danielle de Kisere: And they always wanna do this at my feet. I’m trying to think of where I think it’s an
Sam Believ: actually do it for you as much as they do it for themselves.
Danielle de Kisere: If we can, if we could all find a way to connect and connecting with nature is one of the most beautiful ways to do that.
But the majority of the world lives in cities. They don’t have the opportunity to go and connect with nature. Know, cacao could be a really beautiful practice as a way to stay connected. Instead of, getting up in the morning and feeling sh feeling sad about your day and oh, I gotta get up and I gotta go to work.
I don’t wanna do what I have to do, I let me drink some coffee ’cause I’m tired and I’m just gonna knock it out. I’m gonna wake up. Instead of doing that, when you consciously decide to drink cacao as your morning beverage, then that’s making a conscious decision that I am gonna take a few moments to really focus on what I want to achieve today.
What are my intentions for today? And I think cacao can really help that, the Arcos believe that all of the thoughts and knowledge of that there that has been passed down from their ancestors also can be passed on to people through their cacao or through their crops, whether that’s cacao or coffee, or coca leaves or sugarcane.
They take care of their crops in the ancestral tradition, and they’re constantly in this form of meditation and awareness of their connection with the earth. And they believe that by sharing the cacao with you, that you can also tap into that as well. There, there are so many ways that ca cacao can be beneficial, whether it’s spiritual or emotional or just physical, with the properties, all the vitamins and nutrients and antioxidants and oh my God, all the things that are in there.
Maybe this. So there, there are so many ways that people can choose to drink a cow. You don’t have to be, on a spiritual mission every day. I have people that bite just because they want all the vitamins and nutrients and the polyphenols and the antioxidants as a, the over wine. And this is part of their wellness body activating routines.
So many beautiful ways to use cacao.
Sam Believ: So I know you’re yourself is also are very, you’re very into the ayahuasca world and you organized ceremonies and you. I drink and still drink a lot Ayahuasca. I want your take on this. What, when we offer caca to the people at La Wire it’s after this ayahuasca ceremonies are over.
It’s the morning right before they leave. And we try to use it as a tool for integrations. The importance of integration post ceremony and specifically as a catalyst, because sometimes people go back home and they they just forget life starts happening. But if they have this daily ritual where they can sit down and drink a cow, and then maybe together with it they can meditate or journal or set intentions for the day, as you say, and add other layers.
This kind of stack it, but that sort of pleasant moment of drinking that cacao because it is very tasty. And I congratulate you on figuring out how to make it tasty after all those tasks because I drink it regularly. And it’s also very addictive in a good way. Yes. So it’s using our desire and our addiction to something tasty and healthy and then building other habits around it and create this like morning ritual where for half an hour you drink your cacao and you just hold something warm and you connect, as you say.
So what do you think about cacao as a potential tool for integration? What do you think about integration in general?
Danielle de Kisere: I think it’s a beautiful tool and I’m, and I really like that idea. I might have to steal it. We have at times offered cacao as a way to open up the group when they first arrive.
And I do know lots of people that ha, that offer cacao in their integration circles as well. As. As a powerful heart opener this is also a great way in your integration sessions to allow people to open up a little bit more to really feel that. But the idea of carrying forth your experiences in the tools that, that you learn in your ceremonies and your retreats to stay connected afterwards, whether that’s, cacao, whether that’s the music that you hear in ceremony, whether that’s the fluids that you get from the plant fluids that are often available in ceremonies.
These are all great tools to be able to reconnect because I think one of the biggest problems is people come to ceremony and they have this beautiful experience and they learn so much and then they go back into their real lives and then. It’s oh. And little by little you start losing that connection that, that beautiful feeling, it’s oh, somebody cut you off on the road and oh, your boss is mean.
And oh, the lady at, Walmart was rude and like all these things like, oh, I have to go stand in line in the bank for an hour. And hey, this, and I gotta do, like little by little it starts taking away the, that beautiful connection that you achieved in ceremony. And and so whatever tools that we have to stay connected to that’ll bring us back to that moment is really great.
So by closing your ceremonies with cacao, I think that’s a beautiful idea because then also it gives the opportunity to the people like, oh, wait a minute. I remember how great I felt that morning. And then I’m going to try to recreate that every day and then I’m gonna focus on that every day and I’m gonna remember what I learned and what I was trying to achieve in my ceremonies.
And I think that’s a beautiful way, integration. Integration is actually a new thing that people have really been talking about the last couple years. When I first started drinking medicine here in Columbia, it was just like here’s your cup. Whatever happens to you.
Yeah. And so there was no, there’s no talk about any, anything having to do with the history of the medicine or the elders in Columbia really believe that the medicine will show you what you need to know. And that’s great if you have the opportunity to really work with the elders and drink a lot of medicine.
And that’s great ’cause the medicine will teach you all these things, but the Western mind wants to know, why does this happen this way? How does this happen? What does this mean? And I really believe that the western mind works a little bit differently. And so this is where it’s really important to.
Find a way to bridge what you learn from the elders, what you learn from the medicine and somehow connect that into your experience and then carry that forth into your life. The last couple years there’s been a lot of lot of integration talk. A lot of people have been offering classes facilitator programs a lot of psychologists, a lot of therapists have really been adding this up to their practices.
And it’s just all of a way, because oftentimes you can go to ceremony and just get blown wide open and have this beautiful out of body experience outta world experience. All these things that happen to you and then you’re just. Dump back into life and like, how do you integrate the two realities?
And if you don’t find a way to, to combine the two somehow then it gets lost. So I think the integration thing is a really great thing. It’s not something that I’m super great at. But we have a lot of people as a busy
Sam Believ: business owner. I understand. Yes. Myself too.
I’m not, and it’s so funny ‘
Danielle de Kisere: cause, I don’t really like to talk about the medicine. I don’t really like to talk about my work with the medicine. I, the majority of people that meet me in the world would never even know that this is what I do if they didn’t meet me at ceremony. My experiences with medicine are my experiences and I don’t really think that it needs to be shared and talked about too much. ’cause I think it takes away a little bit. And I, and it’s not up to me to convince everyone else that it’s, that they should have the medicine. If somebody comes to me and wants to, thinks that they might be ready and they wanna know how to do that, then great.
I’ll help you find the right place for that. But it’s not my job to tell you. It’s your time. And it’s not my job to tell you what the universe was trying to tell you in your ceremony. And I think that’s something that a lot of people need to be really careful when they choose their integration therapist or that, so that because I’m always super conscious of not interpreting other people’s experiences.
I just don’t think it’s my place in the world. Yeah. And
Sam Believ: I think only the person themselves can know the meaning because your subconscious talks to you in the language. Only you can understand. But let’s go back to the ka. So what is what is ceremonial cacao and how is it different from, let’s say, just the cacao you buy in the store?
Danielle de Kisere: There really isn’t any difference. Cacao is cacao, right? In the sense, our cacao is, it’s really the difference between ceremonial cacao and regular cacao lies in how it was prepared and how it is treated before it gets to you. If your goal is to use cacao as a tool in your life for your wellbeing, for your mental, physical, emotional wellbeing.
That you really wanna choose cacao that has the right base. If you are buying cacao, that was factory farmed per se, like in Peru, they’re just cutting down so much native forest to set up these huge industrial plantations of cacao. And the deforestation that happens and then you have massive corporations that, that own these farms and workers that are not getting paid.
God forbid you’ve bought a cacao from Africa, where, you know, still 80% of the labor that works in the cacao fields in Africa is slave labor and child labor. Ha those energies. Go into your cacao. And it’s the same with your food as well, and your medicine as well, and everything in life.
But if you choose cacao, that has been grown in harmony with what’s around it that hasn’t been, that the forest hasn’t been cut down for your cacao, that it hasn’t been sprayed with chemicals, that the people that grow it are growing it with the right intentions to that it’s not just this huge commercial project.
All of those things will energetically infuse itself in your cacao, and that’s what you really want for ceremonial cacao. But if you were to look at, my cacao trees versus this cacao tree, the cacao bean is insane bean. But energetically. It’s really important to think about where your cacao comes from and who is processing it as well.
So you have to look at how it’s grown, and the deforestation and the chemicals and the, what goes into this? Who’s processing it, who’s touching it? But also when it gets to the factory that processes, what are their intentions, is it just mass produced and somebody’s buying it to call it ceremony or Pi house so they can make a lot of money?
Are they are they really putting the intentions in there to create a beautiful product? A whole product, in the sense that, we know where it comes from. These people are making more than they’re asking for on this. We, we have this, like our relationship with the indigenous here, we have, a beautiful relationship with them.
That they get paid more than they asked for. That. That we, we help them with other projects, that there’s inter exchange of knowledge. So this is really important for me. But then when the cacao is here at our farm, it’s we treat it with the care that, we don’t just oh my God, we have to go up every day.
We have to make a cow and nobody wants to be here. This sucks. No. The people that are making ca cow really wanna be there and make beautiful cacao for you. Because this is what’s important and I package it. We use 100% completely compostable packaging. It doesn’t go in plastic. It’s not, there’s so many different layers of this, just my packaging, is it made in China and shipped here?
And, are we creating more pollution in the world with this? For me, all of these things are really important so that when you get your cacao that I produced, that I know it’s gonna, that I know the people that grew it we’re happy. I know that the people that made it we’re happy and you are happy to get it.
And we’ve done as little, much, a little bit of damage to the world as possible in the process of getting it to you.
Sam Believ: This episode is sponsored by Lara Ioas Retreat. Most of Lara, if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, some of you might have already been to Lara before.
For those who don’t know us yet, we started Lara four years ago. At Lara, we combine authenticity, accessibility, and affordability is currently highest rated Iowas retreat in South America with more than 705 star reviews and an average rating of five stars. If you come to lare, you’ll experience powerful, authentic ceremonies led by our indigenous shaman.
Fernando, in a. Very beautiful venue. Just one hour south of Meine Columbia. We’re surrounded by nature and have comforts like hot water wifi at La Wire. Our team has guided more than 2,500 people through this life-changing transformation of Ayahuasca experience. At the same time, we keep it very affordable.
So whether you’re coming for healing, clarity, or a deeper connection to yourself, LA Wire is the best choice. If it is your first time drinking Ayahuasca, you will love our three and a half hour preparation course and integration support. All of that is included in price as well as pick up from Metagene accommodation and ayahuasca.
Visit la wire.com to book your retreat or learn more. Laira Connect. Heal Grow L-A-W-A-Y-R a.com. So I just realized I’ve been lying to people because I thought that the difference between the ceremonial cacao and the store-bought cacao is the type of the bean.
Because they told me that’s Creo, Jovie.
It has more Theo Brome.
Danielle de Kisere: You’re partially correct. It depends. There is a lot, especially here in Columbia, there is a lot of Creo cacao, a lot of the table chocolate that you might buy at the stores here. And table chocolate is really only a Colombian thing. Your listeners in the US we don’t have that there.
There’s and there’s baking chocolate, which is yeah. Really low grade, 100% pure chocolate. But you don’t wanna make a ceremony out of that.
Sam Believ: Yeah, it’s, that doesn’t taste the same way.
Danielle de Kisere: No most of the cacao in Columbia is fine flavored cacao. I think it’s 95% of the cacao in Columbia is fine flavored cacao.
So we have creole trees, which are the original trees, or as closer to the original as possible. And you’ll find a lot of that in in the Sierra Nevada because. They have their old trees, and what they do is they just use the seeds from the same trees and make new trees because they don’t have the money to buy fancy trees.
They don’t have the money to buy chemical fertilizers. They don’t have the money to buy chemical insecticides. If it grows. There’s really not that many diseases that Ca cow are susceptible to. There is a mold that grows on it, and if that, the best thing to do is just cut it off and get rid of that, and eventually you can control that without any chemicals, but they don’t have the money for that.
Most of the growers in the Sierra Nevada, they have very small amounts of trees. They grow a little bit working with his dral and he works a lot with the community there and the associations. And they’ve started to form small associations where they bring in their harvest to a central fermentation plant.
So that it gets properly fermented and then from there it ends up here. So it’s still community run. But this in ensures that a more even taste because I really think the taste is important. There’s a lot of people that tell you that, ah, no ceremonial couch should be harsh. It should be straw.
And, but if you don’t like to drink it, then you’re not gonna drink it. Then you won’t ever get the benefits. I started off learning how to make chocolate, bean to bar chocolate for chocolate bars. So I took that same knowledge as to how to find the right beans and how to, toast it correctly and how to process it correctly so that your ceremonial cacao tastes like fine chocolate.
Because I think that’s really important. So you will find a lot of cho trees here in Columbia. We have a lot here of the trees that came with the farm. Some of them are hybrid trees, and the new ones that I’ve planted are hybrid trees. The problem with the Creole trees, they’re the originals.
They don’t have the disease resistance and they don’t produce a whole lot. So you won’t find a whole lot of them planted as much anymore. But when people talk about hybrid trees you often get a lot of people worry that it’s genetically modified and that’s not the case. It’s not genetically modified.
There are amazing university programs here. There’s such great studies on cacao here in Columbia. It’s really beautiful. But what they’re doing is they’re taking the original trees and they graft on, branches of other cacaos that may produce more to create a hybrid tree. And so this is really beautiful because it can double the production of a farmer.
And by eradicating some of the diseases that are common and also increasing production, but you’re still getting really fine flavored cacao. So all of the cacao we get from pta, mayo most of that will be Trin cacao, which is the hybrid cacao. It’s the cross between Creo and for aero edit.
It creates a beautiful tasting cacao but it’s a little bit easier for the farmers to manage in bout Mayo, specifically the, over the last 10 years or so, the government has been working with a lot of NGOs, a lot of charities to help the people. Plant cacao in place of other crops that may not be as legal like coca.
Yeah. And so it started out as a project to really replace Coca which is a whole different story. But I think the people are starting to really notice that hey, cacao, is a really valuable crop. And it’s really great for the environment and it’s really great for a lot of things.
You can grow it in conjunction with a lot of other things. So a lot of people are really now starting to really catch on and plant a lot of cacao. But what we’re now getting out of, there was originally programs to help empower the people. And so there was a lot of cocoa eradication programs and a lot of programs to help the indigenous that live on the reservations with new crops.
And so they were given trees. Which are hybrid trees. And our most popular chocolate bar comes from 50 minus is some of the best chocolate I’ve ever had you do. So it’s not saying that it doesn’t have value, so you are partially correct. Here in Columbia, like I said, 95% of the cacao here in Columbia is fine flavor cacao.
If you go to Africa, it’s pretty much all forest cacao which is which was developed from the original cacao trees. But it produces just massive amounts of cacao that just really tastes horrible. Yeah. And you’ll find that a lot in Africa and you’ll find that a lot in Peru. It’s a mix.
It’s actually interesting. Cacao was a cacao originated in the Amazon basin. You could probably go to Ecuador or to Brazil and they’ll tell you that no, no CACA originated here in our country. But it came from the Amazon, which at that point, there was no Columbia, there was no Brazil, there was no Ecuador, there was no Peru.
It was all just the Amazon basin. And it was actually a very short bush. It wasn’t actually a tree. And, it was the indigenous at the time, were so industrious and they were so observant of all the things that were in the forest. So they were constantly walking around and seeing what could be of use in their natural environment.
And they discovered that the birds would go and pack at the. The cacao pods, the little ones that were growing on, these little bushes. And the birds would then start to fly like they were drunk. And they discovered that the, once the cacao juice started fermenting that it became alcohol. And so its first original purpose was as an alcoholic beverage.
But the indigenous, they were, they had, this huge network where they were constantly traveling by BGE and visiting other tribes and visiting. And eventually they took the cacao out to the ocean. And at that time there was all these slave trip ships and spice traders moving around the planet on their sailing vessels.
And they went there and started trading it with people. And it became super popular for that. And and people started cultivating the cacao and it started changing from being a bush into a tree. Still not a very big tree, really. Most of ’em are only about, five, six feet tall. And then it started spreading around the world.
So this original one, you won’t see it too much anymore. But it went to Mexico and it went to Africa and it went to all the islands and it started changing depending on where it went. So we ended up with creole trees. We ended up with the forest arrow trees that developed in Africa and the Trin trees, which were a combination of the two in the island of Trinidad.
They planted both because there was a lot of ship traffic there. They had planted both and were really developing a lot of cacao there. And then a hurricane came and wiped out the entire island. And so they were so busy focusing on rebuilding their cities. They didn’t really pay that much attention to the old, the old farms and stuff and new trees started popping up that were a combination of the Creole and the forest stereo, and the people found out that.
Had the beautiful taste of the Creole beans, but it was stronger and produced more. And so that’s pretty much what you see when people talk about fine flavored cacao. Most of it’s t trita. And you can find that all over the world now.
Sam Believ: So it’s interesting that you talk about Colombian government replacing coca plantations with with cacao plantations, because one of the, one of the sort of unofficial missions that I’m on is rebranding Columbia from bad drugs to good drugs or from from cocaine to ayahuasca, or in this case to cacao as well.
So I’m glad that people are doing it already. It’s a great idea.
Danielle de Kisere: The theme of Coca it’s such a delicate thing to talk about because, if you are not in Columbia, you think of, the drug wars and you think of Pablo Escobar and you think of all these things.
And so the theme of coca is really complicated because. There are people there, there are there, there are a lot of people growing coca still to this day. And even you can even find it nearby here in Antioch. But mostly it’s in, in different parts because it’s easier to control over there.
But there are people that are forced into growing it that really don’t have any choice. They’re just told, like the coons are told, you’re gonna grow coca for us now and you can’t say no, but they get paid for it. It’s a complicated thing ’cause Coca is one of the original sacred medicines as well.
I don’t know if you’re your Titus or your elders or anyone here on the podcast is really ever talked about the law of the origin. It’s quite interesting because the indigenous speak about how every plant medicine has an owner and this owner is the spiritual owner that knows all of the knowledge of the plant.
And how to utilize it to help the people and how to properly take care of the medicine. So we have tobacco, which the indigenous talk about as being the first gift to humans from God and all the beautiful things that tobacco can do. And it was gifted to the people. And according to the legends the indigenous people of the Amazon, the re and the Witoto are the owners of tobacco.
And they’re the ones that carry all of the spiritual knowledge of tobacco. Of course, it’s used everywhere, you have ra which is the powdered tobacco you have and then you have coca. And supposedly the owners of Coca are the tribes of the Sierra Nevada region, and you have ayahuasca and the supposed owners of that are the.
Cohan and the Inga and the Si people of the Lower put Mayo region there. And you have cacao, which also has a spiritual owner, and this is a funny one, but the spiritual owner of Cacao is technically the ancient Mayans and the Aztecs because it was the, even though it originated here, it was the ancient mines and Aztecs that really started to understand the spiritual properties of cacao and how to utilize it.
So they’re the spiritual owners of that. So every plant medicine has a spiritual owner. They say marijuana is, its spiritual owner is in India, the natives of the actual country, India. And so
Sam Believ: my people are the spiritual owners of the vodka.
Danielle de Kisere: Alright, just kidding. That’s a good one. You can have that.
So when these medicines are used in accordance to the rules that have been set forth, then these are beautiful things. For a person. Coca is one of the most nutrient dense leaves, plants that is found on the planet. It has so many beautiful nutrients and properties and that’s why it’s been used for so long.
Because it can, it’s an, it’s a food for your body. It’s also a f it’s also a sacred medicine to stay connected to God. It can help with all kinds of ailments. The same with tobacco. Tobacco can, keep you connected to God. It can also, cure all your physical ailments, cure your depressions, all of these things.
But the problem is if you’re not using these things in accordance to the rules, that’s when. They no longer serve the people. So you have coca, which is this beautiful thing, but somebody comes along Hey, this kind of feels good and we can make a lot of money if we do this. So they take the coca and they treat it with chemicals, and then it becomes this product and people are getting rich and it’s created all these wars and all this death.
But the original plant is a beautiful thing. So to only talk about, eradicating coca, and the same with ayahuasca, you have the beautiful, pure way to do it, or you can, extract the chemicals and, get really high. But you’re not really connecting with it. Cacao is a beautiful medicine, but you overprocess it, you add a lot of chocolate, then it makes you fat.
It’s
Sam Believ: add milk and sugar and you
Danielle de Kisere: Yeah. So then it takes away from the beautiful properties that it has. So every plant has this spiritual owner. And so in the context of Coca, coca has been used by the people you know, of this country for millennia.
It is a powerful medicine. You’ll see the tribes of the Sierra Nevada always walk around with their bag, and they’re always chewing on their leaves. The tribes of the Amazon will turn it into Mabe and share this in their community meetings as a way to connect as community.
So when we talk about eradicating it, you’re not really talking about the real reasons behind this. One problem is you have massive amounts of poverty, and especially here in the rural parts of Columbia where there is no access. You’re here at my farm, it was a whole journey to get here.
Imagine the people that live here that don’t have any access to anything. And here’s a way to quickly make some money. And, there’s no schools, there’s no social services, there’s no nothing, and people need to eat. So you have that. So you can’t just say, we need to eradicate Coca because it has a beautiful purpose.
And there, there is a great need for the people that are growing it. They just really need to feed themselves. They need to send their kids to school. So unless we address the issues that are causing this but that’s, like I said, a whole nother story. Yeah.
Sam Believ: I personally really like Mamba, for example, and it’s a beautiful medicine and.
And tobacco and cacao and I explore a bit of all of them, and they all have their use. It’s just it’s less about the plants themselves and more about the intention with which you use them. Yeah. Should everyone stop drinking coffee and start drinking cacao every morning? Ah,
Danielle de Kisere: I don’t know. It depends on your relationship with coffee.
I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my life. And that is purely because as I was growing up, my mother, who still to this day, cannot function. To do anything without her coffee. Every morning she has to have a cup or two of coffee. So I remember being a kid, we couldn’t go ever do anything. I remember waking up on Christmas morning and there’d be a tree full of presents, and we couldn’t open the presents until my mother had her coffee.
So I decided I was never gonna have coffee. So I don’t drink coffee. But if you have a healthy relationship with coffee, I don’t see any reason why you can’t continue to have that relationship. But if you are only drinking coffee as a way to get yourself motivated every day if you’re, if your coffee has switched from being something pleasurable and something beneficial to your life to being something needed, then that’s when you might need a shift.
I think connecting to cacao is a much better way to start your day because of the properties that cacao has. I think it’s so much more beneficial for you. But people love their coffee and the coffee growers. Grow coffee for a reason and they still need support as well.
Sam Believ: I personally think within the next 50 years, more and more people will start drinking cacao instead of coffee because it’s just, it’s less, less strong, less jittery, more has more property.
So maybe doing both at the same time. But I’m a believer in the future of cacao. So on the topic of cacao you mentioned, cacao culture in colo, they, people, it’s available here, people drink it. What else have you noticed? And do you know why is it, what’s the history of it?
Why is it why is it available here, but not us?
Danielle de Kisere: Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know why the US doesn’t have such a. Cacao culture in the morning. The US is, we have hot chocolate, which is mostly milk, powder and sugar, and a little bit of cocoa. It’s powder. And that’s what I drank growing up as a kid.
I think here in, in Columbia, because there is so much cacao grown here, families all over the place, they’d have, their few cacao trees, they’d roast a little bit on the stove, they’d mash it up and they drink, hot cacao drinks. And this became part of the culture here.
And when you go to a restaurant and for breakfast, you’re given a choice. Do you want cacao or do you want coffee? And you’ll never see that outside of Columbia, I don’t think. But it’s also like the worst possible quality cacao that you will ever encounter. Most of the time it’s absolutely disgusting and I have to cover it up with lots of sugar or cinnamon or.
In some cases cheese. I don’t even know what the cheese or the cacao thing is. But it’s, I like it. I like, our neighbors and friends are really happy when I get a batch of cacao and it doesn’t meet our standards and I give it away so they, they’re not used to super high quality stuff, but that also applies to coffee, because traditionally coffee, all the good coffee was exported and they didn’t know until just recently what good coffee was.
Sam Believ: Yeah. So you mentioned that local people, they just dry it, grind it up, and then make a cow. So that’s a kind of process, but how is that process different? Where you have I’ve seen your little factory there. What’s what’s the process of making good cacao?
Danielle de Kisere: The, one of the.
One of the most important things is that you start off with good quality cacao, and it has to be well fermented, and it has to be well dried. If it, if you don’t have that base, you’re never gonna get anything good out of it. But if we start off with good cacao, then the next really important step is if the roasting it has to be roasted.
I know there’s a huge movement in people that talk about rock cacao, and I can tell you that there is no such thing as rock cacao. For a couple reasons. One is in the fermentation process of fermenting the cac, in fermenting the cacao, it naturally gets up to about 140 degrees which is well above what the raw foodies say is the maximum temperature that qualifies for raw food.
I think it’s what, 110 degrees. And so this naturally occurs if the heat, if it doesn’t naturally generate that heat in the fermentation process, it won’t change the flavor. So if you were to go out in the cacao fields right now and pick a cacao pod first you’d suck off the juice, which you had some cacao juice earlier you’d suck that off.
And then you end up with the bean. And the bean, you can eat it just like that raw but it just tastes like a knot. It doesn’t taste anything like chocolate.
Sam Believ: Same with coffee, right?
Danielle de Kisere: Yeah. So the first part of starting to get the chocolate flavor that everybody is looking for starts in the fermentation.
And if you don’t get it up over that temperature, it’s not going to ferment right. And you’re not gonna get the chocolatey flavor. And the second part of really developing the chocolatey flavor is in the roasting. So if you don’t roast it I do know there’s a company that sells on a roasted cacao. It’s absolutely disgusting.
It doesn’t taste like anything and it certainly doesn’t taste like chocolate. So if you don’t roast it, you’re not gonna get that flavor. And we, we try our best to roast it at a lower temperature for shorter amount of times. That’s one of the big tricks of what if you end up with cacao that doesn’t taste good, is they over roast it for long periods of time to try and kill all those off flavors.
So as long as we start off with a good bean, we just lightly roast it to pull out a little bit more of the cacao flavor. From there we take off the shells. We don’t waste any part of the cacao. I sell the cacao shells as cacao hus tea, which is super, super popular because it’s very light.
It has a nice chocolate flavor. It’s full of the line, full of magnesium, full of all of that stuff. But it has zero calories and zero caffeine. But yeah. Our cacao has tea has gotten so popular that half the time I’m out of it because I can’t produce as much tea as people want. So we separate out the tea and then it goes into the stone grinders.
So they grind for a few days, so they’re perfectly smooth. It’s also in this grinding process that it helps expel all of the acidic and bitter flavors that live in the cacao bean. And it’s very important. I know there are some companies out there that claim to have raw cacao, but there really is no such thing.
If you have something that tastes anything like chocolate, it’s not raw and there is no possible way for it to be raw. There’s, it’s physically, chemically, scientifically impossible.
Sam Believ: Yeah. Last question. Let’s say somebody just did a retreat at Lair and they bought a pack of the cow. They’re back home.
What’s the best way to prepare their morning or afternoon ceremonial cup of cacao?
Danielle de Kisere: I usually use about a half an ounce or in grams it’s 15 grams of cacao per cup. I have to have sugar mine that I use pinella, which is raw. The can literally cane
Sam Believ: juice, sugar, cane
Danielle de Kisere: juice, sugar.
I put a little of that in there. I put it in water. I heat it up and then I have a cacao drink. I don’t usually put milk in mine or any alternative milks. I know lots of people like it that way. I don’t think it needs it. A lot of people like to put cayenne. A lot of people like to put other spices in there.
Cinnamon, I like my pure a little bit sweet. Sometimes it’s just a little touch of salt. Pulls out the chocolate flavor. I don’t like it super strong and super thick. That’s why I use about 15 grams. If I’m preparing it for a ceremony, I might make it thicker to give people a little,
Sam Believ: what is the ceremonial dose that you would give to per person?
Danielle de Kisere: A ceremonial dose should really be between like three quarters and one full ounce. So that’s 20 to 28 grams. But that’ll end up with a really thick cup of cacao which can be difficult. So it also goes back to, it needs to be prepared in a way, but people are gonna enjoy it.
’cause if they don’t enjoy it, they’re not gonna appreciate it. They’re not gonna connect to it, they’re not gonna keep doing it. But on a daily basis, 15, 15 grams of cacao, 20 grams of cacao is more than enough to really feel, and I can feel it even as much cacao as I drink and as much how energy I have around here all the time.
One cup of cacao. And I definitely feel it in the energetic push in my body the movement of energetic flow. It’s really beautiful.
Sam Believ: Very nice. It’s getting dark here, so we’re gonna start to wrap up. Daniel tell the listeners where they can find more about you and where can they get your cacao?
Danielle de Kisere: We are origin cacao.com, which is origin with an E-O-I-O-R-I-G-E-N which is the Spanish spelling origin cacao.com. You can find us on our own website. You can also find us on Amazon in the us, Amazon in the uk, and Amazon in Australia. We have distributors all over the world, so you can find us as Poland, Iceland, the Netherlands.
I sometimes even here, you can find us in ballet at times.
Sam Believ: And you can even find some at Lara store.
Danielle de Kisere: Yes. You do end up selling quite a lot of cacao every month. I’m, yeah. I’m very happy about that. So
Sam Believ: thank you Danielle. Thank you for educating us on topic of cacao. Yeah. Sorry,
Danielle de Kisere: I can nerd out a little bit and,
Sam Believ: I’m sure some people appreciated that.
And I definitely like to learn. Guys you’re listening to Cacao podcast. Just kidding. I ask a podcast as always with you, the host and belief, and I’ll see you in the next episode. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you’d like to support us and psychedelic renaissance at large, please follow us and leave us a like, wherever it is you’re listening, share this episode with someone who will benefit from this information.
Nothing in this podcast is intended as medical advice, and it is for educational and entertainment purposes only. This episode is sponsored by Laira Ayahuasca Retreat. At Laira, we combine affordability, accessibility, and authenticity. Laira connect, heal, grow. Guys, I’m looking forward to hosting you.