Chocolate factory coming to downtown
Lirio Chocolate to open Eagle Bend Road location
Chris Kopek, owner of Clinton’s new Lirio Chocolate manufacturing operation at 419 Eagle Bend Rd., sits with bags and buckets of cocoa beans imporrted from all over the world. He will be making his chocolate in the facility, which is next door to Real Dry Cleaners, just east of the Market Street bridge downtown. (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
Chris Kopek has begun moving his Lirio Chocolate operation to a building he purchased in August at 419 Eagle Bend Road, next to Real Dry Cleaners in the downtown area along the railroad tracks just east of the Market Street bridge.
He’s still renovating the building, in which he eventually will open a retail store to sell the gourmet chocolate bars he now sells mostly online and at coffee shops and other retail outlets.
“Phase One is getting the manufacturing part of the business going, then Phase Two will be the retail store,” he said Friday.
He has been making chocolate at a facility in Knoxville since 2018, but recently decided to buy a building and relocate the business to Clinton, he said.
That’s partly because it’s closer to where he lives in Hardin Valley, but also because real estate here is more affordable, and the downtown Clinton scene is “perfect for what I’m trying to do,” Kopek said.
Although he still has interior renovation to complete before he moves his large cocoa bean roaster to his Clinton building, Kopek has already begun making chocolate in the facility using two smaller coffee bean roasters.
He has shelves in one room stacked with sacks and buckets full of cocoa beans he has imported from several countries whose climates are conducive to growing the beans, including Vietnam, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Trinidad, Nicaragua, Peru and Fiji, among others, he said.
“The beans come mostly from areas near the Equator,” Kopek said.
The big roaster can process 25 pounds of cocoa beans in about 30 minutes, he said. He then cracks them open to turn them into cocoa “nibs,” which are then refined by being stone-ground for about 24 hours to create a cocoa powder for making the chocolate.
His chocolate bars, bearing the Lirio Chocolate brand, come in a variety of types, ranging from dark chocolate to milk chocolate to horchata white chocolate, which is made with “rice puffs, cinnamon and brown sugar,” Kopek said.
The dark chocolate comes in various levels of cocoa that range from sweet to almost bitter (with a high percentage of pure cocoa). He said he also makes a “decadent” hot-chocolate drink mix.
Kopek got into the chocolate business after visiting a chocolate shop in Asheville and trying some it its dark chocolate, which he said was much better than anything he had every bought in a retail store.
“I just thought I’d love to do this,” he said. “I began trying it, and after a while, I finally made something amazing.”
From there, he decided to start his business and begin sharing his creations with others.
“It’s actually my second job,” he said. “My main job is for a tech company in data and software security.” His wife, Emily, is a physician.
Eventually, Kopek wants to offer tours of his chocolate factory and do corporate events. And later on, he will add other chocolate products to the mix, including truffles, he said.
No opening date has been set yet for the retail store, as he still has a lot of renovating to do, he said.
His company website is liriochocolate.com, where people can order his products for now.