FAQ
Felt Hats, Clothing, & Textiles
Wool is a living material that is smell & stain resistant, so washing your wool hat and outerwear won’t need regular washing. When needed, approach in 2 ways:
Spot Clean: Take a toothbrush or similar and brush over soiled area. Add warm water if stain is deeply set.
Full Wash: Wash in COLD to LUKEWARM water with a special wool sensitive soap with VERY LITTLE AGITATION. Let the wool soak in the water for 20min to 2 hours depending on level of soiling. Ring out and air dry!
We work with 2 Peruvian families, the Avedaño Mamani Family & Acevedo Family, to produce our Hats and Textiles. The Avedaño Mamani Family exclusively produce our OhmGnomes Hats with alpaca fiber from alpaca that they raise in the Andes. The Acevedo Family exclusively produce our Shipibo Textiles, Bags, and Clothing in the Amazon Jungle of Peru. We at OhmGnomes produce all of our wool felt clothing in our California workshop.
Well Gnomes are known for hats, obviously! Beyond that, Wool is naturally insulative, thermoregulating, dirt, stain, and fire resistant, repels water, dampens EMFs, grounds a person energetically, and is a living item that will grow with a wearer over a lifetime. In addition, by choosing to wear handmade wool hats, together, we can ethically and sustainably support our crafters in the Andes to continue their generational farm and traditional way of life while spreading their magic upon the heads of so many gnomes.
Prepackaged & Bulk Food & Herbs
Our Peruvian Heirloom Cacao is Organic, Farm Direct, Fair Trade, and most of all is bridging the gap our modern world has created between where our food comes from and unapproachable global food systems. By sharing Farm Direct Cacao with our gnomies we are reintroducing people to where their Chocolate comes from directly through transparency, education, content, and ultimately with the highest quality Cacao in the world.
Our 100% Cacao Criollo is Organically Grown in the San Martin Region of Peru free of Pesticides & Herbicides, is fermented in specialty boxes, indirectly sun dried, and hand selected to meet our high quality standards. Our farmers are also contracted at above market value to purchase their entire harvests that meet our standards!
We have searched Peru to find the best Cacao in the world and found not just the best, but also the happiest, Cacao in the San Martin region in the high jungle. With flirty notes of fruit and chocolate, raw and toasted, these beans are an experience of the real intimate beauty of chocolate in-the-raw, undressed and unadulterated. In Beans or Paste the experience of real chocolate is electrifying and opening in the body and mind in ways not many have felt. Then add on the fact that this product is 100% pure Cacao, Organic, Beyond Fair Trade, Farm Direct, and Happy just dazzles this fine Cacao up even more. We directly work with farmers to help them to produce top shelf Cacao through educating, fair purchases, and lots of love. This Cacao is what happy tastes like. This is what Fair Business tastes like. This is what real chocolate tastes like.
Access to real, pure, yummy, Fair, Direct, and Organic Cacao and Chocolate is near impossible in most parts of the world. We feel and believe it is our mission to create abundant access to this plant medicine to the far reaches of the world but to simultaneously support the farmers directly who are making this happen on the ground level. The traditional Cacao Market has been riddled with poor pay to slavery, mass mono-cropping, and poor quality, leaving a close to $1B market vastly void of the real experience of what Cacao can be. Happy Farmers, Happy Trees, Happy People, Happy Gnomes. Everyone happy and making Fair Livings is what this beautiful plant medicine can support. This is an opportunity to help make the world happier, healthier, and filled with quality chocolate! We heard this calling in 2016 and have not looked back since. Create change, share Cacao; this is how we’re living now.
Our Cacao criollo is produced in the San Martin region of Peru, between 600 - 900 meters high in the magical Peruvian Amazon Rainforest, by cooperatives and associations of small scale farmers. Grown organic and with no herbicides or pesticides, our Cacao is grown on trees free of any adulteration. Grown with love under the shade of groves of coconut trees, our Cacao is picked ripe, dried and processed in state of the art facilities by Makao Peru, and shared thereafter by the Gnomes! Even beans from our own OhmGnomes farm in the region are included in the whole mix! There are 2 to 3 hands these beans pass through before they arrive to you.
The answer is NO! Cacao is a highly abundant varietal of crop that allows for every region to develop its own flavor of bean. Depending on soil composition, climate, love, and variety of bean, the flavor of Cacao is different from bean to bean. Cacao can exhibit sweet aromas and tastes of vanilla, fruit, dark, bitter, sweet, and nutty all based on their various growing conditions. From harvest, the fermentation, drying, and roasting processes of various producers of Cacao beans also may drastically change the way Cacao tastes.
There are 3 main varieties of Cacao: Criollo, Forestero, Trinidadio, Arriba.
Cacao criollo: smaller yield, rich in flavors and terpenes, <12” long. Cacao forastero: industry standard, high yielding, hybridized, and is a very hardy crop, Low Quality, strong dark bitter taste, bright red and yellow pods, >12” long pods.
Cacao trinidadio: Mix of taste in between Criollo & Forestero. Pods are pale green and yellow, around 12” long.
Cacao arriba: Almost Exclusively grown in Ecuador, Very Flavorful, Hybridized, around 12” long, Red pods.
“Cocoa” is derived from beans once called Cacao. Usually composed of forestero beans, cocoa is a highly processed form of Cacao that makes the product sweeter and “easier to process” into the majority of chocolate today. Because Forastero beans are usually so bitter, chocolatiers have learned that in quickly toasting the Cacao beans at a very high temperature for small amounts of time restructures the molecular structure of the bean and therefor ultimately changes its taste.
Our Cacao Beans are Raw, our Nibs are Rawish, and our Paste is not Raw. Raw cacao is a slightly funny and complicated designation though. During the fermentation process of all Cacao after it is harvested, the temperature of a batch of beans can reach into the 140 degree or hotter range, increasing the core temperature of the beans well beyond the 110 degree limits of “Raw”. So in that case, not even our full Beans would be raw.
What we intend to represent with our “Raw” labeling is that our product is not further toasted beyond that 110 degree realm by direct heat. Our beans are only fermented and our nibs are briefly toasted at under 110 degrees to remove the shell. Our Paste is made only from ground beans but the internal temperature of the beans increases above 110 degrees during the process, disqualifying it as “raw” in our terms!
Cacao stores well in a sealed, cool, dry place where temperatures can be kept below 80 degrees. With that said, beans and nibs are pretty resilient but moisture exposure will make them not fun to eat anymore. Paste will start to melt at about 90 degrees, so bars, hearts, and packaged paste will begin to misshape. Paste is not bad if it misshapes, it’ll just not look as pretty. Our Paste melts quickly because it is still contains all of its butters and fats and is not tempered. None of our products need refrigeration.
Our cacao paste is 100% pure Cacao Criollo Beans. The only additive that we use is LOVE which we didn’t think anyone would mind.
Our Cacao is Certified Organic by EcoCert, a Peruvian Organic Certification Organization.
Honey & Maple Syrup
We are part of the Maple Valley Cooperative, a coop of 20 various farmers and producer members based in the USA between the Northeast & Midwest. Our candy syrup is coming from the Midwest and all of our waffle syrup is coming from the Northeast!
All Maple Alchemy syrup is certified Organic, Gluten Free, & Kosher!
Our honey is always sourced as locally to our production facility as possible! Currently our honey is being sourced from right outside of Davis, CA in Northern California just outside the Bay Area from a fabulous company called Pure Honey.
As we expand across the USA we intend to source honey regionally to where our products are distributed.
We do not always use Organic Certified Honey because the certification process holds little real environmental or health weight when it comes to honey. Any honey can be certified organic and there are select opportunities when we choose to support apiaries that cannot afford to buy their organic certification.