Bite Sized: David Herrick of Foundry Chocolate on Whisky Chocolate R&D
•David Nilsen
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Welcome to Bean to Barstool Bite Sized, where we spend about 5 minutes on a specific topic in craft beer, craft chocolate, or artisan drinks. Today we're talking with David Herrick of Foundry Chocolate in New Zealand. David takes us behind the scenes of the R&D process for developing their esteemed Whisky bars released annually. Enjoy!
You can listen to the entire episode this clip is from here.
Hey everyone, welcome to Bean to Bar Stool Bite-sized, where we spend about five minutes with some of our favorite people from Kraft Beer or Kraft Chocolate. Today we hear from David Herrick of Foundry Chocolate in New Zealand. Here, David talks about the research and development process for their esteemed whiskey chocolate bar that they release once a year in collaboration with Thompson Distillery. Even though that bar only comes out once a year, there is never a slow spot on the calendar when it comes to getting ready for that release. So, right now, in the summer months for us here in North America, the winter months for them there in New Zealand, they are busy trying out different concepts and narrowing down what they're going to release later this year. So here's David to explain what that RD process involves.
SPEAKER_02
So a lot of it involves blinding me out from what I'm eating. So we've I've we've got the whiskey. We know which Thompson release we're working with this year. I've gone through our tasting. I've chosen which two single origins we're going to give a go. I've made those into absolute nano-test batches of chocolate. So I've made um two 1kg test batches and made them as chocolate, so stone grind them, refined them. We then mature the chocolate. So it was sat for about two months to let the flavours really settle and balance out. Last week I um then hand temper those into test bars. We've got like 11 bars of each to go and eat. And at that point, and I've learnt this from developing rose profiles for all our single origins and our new harvest that are coming through. We have to take everything into code languages. So one becomes whiskey bar triangle, and one becomes whiskey, one becomes whiskey bar square, one's whiskey bar with a green pen, one's got a blue pen on it. Because I've learned that I've got a favorite, I remember things. I've got a favorite roast profile, and I'm biased towards my favorite roast profile from my testing. I might have a bias, I know that I've got a bias towards one single origin because I've got a remote association with it, and I know this person better, or I know this thing about it. So by completely blinding me out and blinding our team out, we then, and then what we do is we eat them. And we're not looking for deep dives into the tasting notes and all that kind of nuance. We're just going, which one do I enjoy eating the most? As that's what matters at the end of the day. And then after a few days, we've got our team kitchen area here, we've got plates with the chocolate out. We're also testing roast profiles for our new Tillum Verivelli Tanzania harvest right now as well. So we've got a couple of whiskey bars, we've got a couple of Tanzania tempered samples as well. And we're eating them and just taking notes about which one we enjoy eating the most. And whichever one we enjoy eating the most becomes the winner. And then we go into our deep dive into the tasting notes of it, the nuances, the flavour journey, the progression. We work with our copywriter, we get everyone involved in it. Then Janelle starts the artwork development. Um, we start concepting all the cool stuff on it. I start pre-selling it to our retailers. Of course, we have to custom print the packaging, so you want to actually know what we're printing rather than waste anything. And and off we go, and all the fun begins.
SPEAKER_00
I love that this is basically an entire year cycle for this one release.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, no, I I love it. And and that's the cool thing is um from a pure business perspective, we probably actually wouldn't do it. Yeah, I love doing it. It keeps me, I get to play with flavors in a way that I don't get to play with the single origins and still do single origin stuff when we get to do special release packaging and all that kind of fun stuff. And it it just becomes part of our cycle and what we do every year, and we love it. And it works. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01
You can find out more about Foundry Chocolate and all the cool details behind this once-a-year whiskey bar in my full conversation with David from back in May of this year. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. The music today was by my dear friend Anna P. S. My name is David Nilsen. Thanks for listening to Bean to Barstool Bite-sized.
