Taking Inventory: Cocoa Beans

There are two main uses for cocoa beans in Minecraft. The first is in making COOKIES! Combine them with a couple of bits of wheat in a crafting bench, and Bob’s your uncle and he’s holding cookies. Each pile of cocoa beans doesn’t just yield one cookie either - but a whopping EIGHT! Best eaten with a nice tall bucket of milk. Sorry about all the CAPITAL LETTERS this week — I always get a bit screamy after too many cocoa beans. APOLOGIES.

The second use for these brilliant beans is as a dye. Cocoa beans craft into brown dye at a 1:1 ratio, and that dye can be used to colour everything from carpets, glass and beds to balloons, banners and fireworks. Not sure why anyone would want to set off a brown firework, but there you go.

Oh, and cocoa beans have a good chance of composting too. So if you’re in need of lots of compost then they’re not a bad choice.

In the real world, cocoa beans grow from the cacao tree, which is native to South America. They come in pods that have a 2-3cm thick, leathery rind. The beans are filled with a sweet pulp that tastes a little like lemonade, with 30-50 large bitter-tasting seeds that range from pink to purple. The pulp is made into juice, and the seeds are fermented into chocolate.

People have been harvesting the beans for about 4,000 years, using it in spiritual ceremonies. Before the European discovery of the Americas, cocoa was an important and valuable commodity. It was said that King Montezuma II of the Aztecs consumed a chocolate-and vanilla-flavoured drink, served in a golden cup, up to 60 times a day. So greedy! I’m more of a 59-cups a day man myself.

Today, cocoa beans are mostly used to make ‘chocolate’ — a mysterious brown foodstuff that you’ve probably never heard of. I certainly haven’t. Apparently, it’s quite tasty. Who knows?