Do you or a loved one struggle on the stairs?

so many couples their age eventually face. (“But we’ll still be in Maine!” Susan emphasized to us.) So, with 6.6 acres, a two-story barn, two garages, and the completely renovated fourplus-bedroom house (with three and a half bathrooms and several handsome stone fireplaces), they’re asking $1,375,000. In our opinion, the property is certainly worth it—especially considering the abutting 130 acres of conservation land. Those surrounding pastures will never give way to a housing development, ever!

After a second cup of tea, we toured the property with Scott and Susan. Every room is practically a showpiece. We loved the library, with its period fieldstone fireplace and mahogany bookcases. And the kitchen is gorgeous—it includes stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, a huge center island, and, well, it’s the nuts. We were particularly fascinated with the framed family photos along one of the upstairs walls. They show all of the Schafers skiing, surfing, mountain climbing, scuba diving, and so forth; we spotted a few taken in Spain, a few others in Africa.

At one point, Susan opened a door at the far end of the second floor, and we walked out onto a balcony overlooking the cavernous interior of the barn. It was quite a sight, with massive old wooden beams seemingly everywhere at different angles and heights. To us it looked a bit like a gigantic modern painting. As to the size of the floor space, let’s just say the boys and their friends played basketball here.

Before taking our leave, we simply had to—despite the cold air that day—drink in the beautiful view again, but this time from one of those rocking chairs on the porch. And you know what? We discovered we probably would have been happy sitting out there until … well, maybe until those distant cows came home.

For more details, contact Ed Gardner of Ocean Gate Realty at 207-773-1919.

ON THE TRAIL OF NEW ENGLAND’S NEWEST BATCH OF PREMIUM-CHOCOLATE MAKERS.

BY KRISSY O’SHEA

To Bar

here’s a sweet, hoppy scent wafting through the halls of 14 Tyler Street today. The former headquarters of the Ames Safety Envelope Company, this massive space in Somerville, Massachusetts, has been converted into a multiuse complex anchored by Aeronaut Brewing, maker of IPAs, pilsners, and ales and producer of hoppy aromas. But the alluring sweetness in the air can be traced to a much smaller operation: a commercial kitchen in the back of the building, where Eric Parkes is moving deftly between a pair of conching machines (in layman’s terms, chocolate mixers). They look like supersized potter’s wheels, and their spinning action blends and emulsifies chocolate liquor and cocoa butter together with sugar to produce the Somerville Chocolate bars that Parkes makes in small batches, beginning with beans sourced from equatorial regions such as Ghana, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Haiti.

Parkes turns to an array of metal racks and, bending down to the lower shelves, pulls out a few carefully wrapped bags of not-quite-perfect bars that won’t make it to market. “Here,” he says, breaking off a corner of a dark bar. “What do you taste?”

The flavor is completely unexpected. There’s not a trace of the waxy, saccharine Halloween chocolate of childhood. Instead, there are exuberant tannins and rich sundried-fruit flavors. Parkes brings out more samples: one earthy and nearly austere; another lush and velvety, heavy with flavors of honey and tropical flowers (the beans were grown in Hawaii). With each new sample,

Parkes expounds on how cacao varies in flavor depending on where it’s grown and how this flavor can be manipulated at every stage of the process: roasting, winnowing, grinding, conching, tempering, and molding.

Parkes is one of New England’s growing number of so-called “bean to bar” chocolate producers. While most confectioners buy premade chocolate and turn it into truffles, bonbons, and other sweets, bean-to-bar makers begin with raw ingredients and produce, as the name implies, mostly bar chocolate. And they approach their craft with the kind of fastidiousness and knowledge of varietals and provenance that one would expect from the head vintner at a grand cru winery.

In this group you’ll find Katherine Reed and Josiah Mayo, who turn out silky bars sprinkled with sea salt or studded with ginger and dried blueberries at Chequessett Chocolate on Cape Cod. There’s also the granddaddy of New England bean-to-bar makers, Somerville’s Taza Chocolate, with its line of Mexican-inspired stone-ground chocolates, and Rogue Chocolatier in central Massachusetts, maker of one of the country’s top chocolate bars in any category.

These producers are rooted in New England, but their beans most definitely aren’t. Theobroma cacao, the cacao tree, is native to the deep tropical regions of Central and South America, and the best makers develop long-term, fair-trade relationships with individual farms there to ensure a steady supply of quality beans. Tom and Monica Rogan of Goodnow Farms, who make chocolate in their smartly converted 225-year-old barn in Sudbury, Massachusetts, travel frequently to farms in Mexico, Central America, and South

America. “Our connection to the farmers is very important,” says Tom. “We work with them to select the most flavorful beans and to ensure that our relationship is equitable.”

This hands-on approach recalls the work of New England’s first chocolate producers, who were importing beans as far back as the mid-17th century. In 1670, Dorothy Jones and Jane Barnard were granted a license to open a public house in Boston serving coffee and chocolate—the earliest such permit on record. Back then, chocolate was consumed as a beverage: Roasted crushed beans (called cacao nibs) were ground by hand on warm stones to melt them, then blended with sugar and spices and whisked with hot water in special chocolate pots. You can learn about colonial chocolate at Boston’s Old North Church campus, where Captain Jackson’s Historic Chocolate Shop—named after an 18th-century chocolate merchant who attended the church—occupies a permanent exhibit space in the Clough House. There, costumed interpreters walk visitors through the process and offer samples of drinking chocolate based on a historic recipe.

Yet even if the current bean-to-bar generation is reviving an old craft, they’re doing it in a more interconnected world. Whereas Dorothy Jones and Jane Barnard likely never visited the Jamaican cacao farms supplying their operation, Tom and Monica Rogan are representative of today’s highly mobile, socially conscious producers. When farmers in the village of San Juan Chivite, Guatemala, needed a new fermentation and drying area, the Rogans funded its construction. After all, they know that their customers want more than the chocolate itself: