Chocolatier plans showroom opening for Valentine’s Day
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Lirio Chocolate Co. owner Chris Kopek shows the areas where the choc- olate factory’s showrooms will be at the site at 419 Eagle Bend Road in down- town Clinton. Renovations for the showroom area are now underway. - G. Chambers Williams III
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Kopek wraps fresh-made chocolate bars for an online shipment on Friday. The business is just across the Norfolk Southern Rail- way tracks from Market Street. - G. Chambers Williams III
The showroom for Clinton’s resident chocolatier, Lirio Chocolate, should be open to the public by next Valentine’s Day, owner Chris Kopek said Friday (Nov. 4).
A work crew had been on site for about a week remodeling the interior of the chocolate factory at 419 Eagle Bend Road to make space for the showroom.
Kopek, who moved his Lirio Chocolate operation to the building in late summer 2021, said that he continues to make chocolate at the site, but is looking forward to being able to open the operation to visitors and sell some of his products locally.
In August 2021, he purchased the building next to Real Dry Cleaners in the downtown area along the Norfolk Southern railroad tracks just east of the Market Street bridge, catercorner to the Clinton railroad depot on the other side of the tracks.
He said then that he was renovating the building, and would eventually 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 last year.
Last week, he said he’s ready to move forward with the retail side of the building.
He had been making chocolate at a facility in Knoxville since 2018, but last year decided to buy the building and relocate the business to Clinton, he said.
It’s closer to where he lives in Hardin Valley, but he said he also decided on the move because real estate here is more affordable, and the downtown Clinton scene is “perfect for what I’m trying to do.”
He uses coffee bean roasters to roast the cocoa beans he uses to make his chocolate from scratch. Shelves in one room are stacked with sacks and buckets full of cocoa beans he imports 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.
His biggest 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, North Carolina, and trying some it its dark chocolate, which he said was much better than anything he had every bought in a retail store.
For Kopek, the chocolate is a side business. His main job is working in date and software security for a technology company. His wife, Emily, is a physician.
Kopek said he also plans to offer tours of the chocolate-making operation, and open his building for corporate events.
The company website is liriochocolate.com, where people can order his prod