Northern Ireland’s Boatyard Gin Launches Bean To Bar Chocolate
Boatyard distillery, an award winning Northern Irish distillery, has developed a gin infused dark chocolate.
The novel chocolate is made from 68 percent dark chocolate sourced from Tanzania by The Proper Chocolate Company, Ireland’s bean-to-bar producer, and features spent botanicals from the distillery, based near Enniskillen in county Fermanagh, a producer of award winning double gin as well as vodka.
Boatyard founder and managing director Joe McGirr, explaining the decision to develop a delicious dark chocolate, says: “We have a lot of spent gin botanicals otherwise known as waste. This waste carries a huge amount of flavour – too good to discard.
“Then we found The Proper Chocolate Company, one of a select few bean-to-bar chocolate producers in this part of the world. The perfect partnership sees us combine our own organic waste with the finest, ethically sourced Tanzanian cocoa and married into an 80g bar. It can be enjoyed on its own, with neat gin or with a gin and tonic,” he adds.
Other ingredients in the novel chocolate, which sells for £6 a bar, are organic cocoa beans, organic un-refined cane sugar and cocoa butter
The organic cocoa beans are from Kokoa Kamili in Tanzania’s Kilombery Valley.
Boatyard double gin features a unique botanical, Sweet Gale, which is foraged from the McGirr family bog and the wheat used for its vodka can be traced from the bottle back to the very field it came from.
Mr McGirr has a successful background in spirits and whiskey knowledge used to build his dream of the first legal distillery in Fermanagh in over 130 years.
The Proper Chocolate Company, founded by Patrick and Kelli Marjolet in May 2016, makes bean-to-bar chocolate in micro-batches in Dublin.
