Featured chocolate maker, January 2025
Alastair (“Ali”) Gower and Friederike (“Freddie”) Gower co-founded Chocolate Tree in 2005 when they were traveling the UK music festival scene with a mobile geodome chocolaterie. They maintain an active life at their home and factory in East Lothian, Scotland, about 30 minutes from Edinburgh.
When Ali is not in the factory making chocolate he can be found outdoors sea free-diving, climbing mountains, playing disc golf or riding a fat bike along the East Lothian coastline. The father of two great kids, Ali is passionate about re-wilding Scotland and conserving the rainforest in South and Central America.
Freddie is the creative master behind Chocolate Tree. She came to Edinburgh from Lübeck, Germany to study math before meeting Ali and starting Chocolate Tree. She creates the packaging design and formulates the recipes. In her spare time Freddie works clay in her home pottery studio and is an avid knitter. She has adopted Scotland as her homeland, and cares passionately about its future.
Chocolate Tree takes a two-pronged approach to crafting their chocolate bars. Their single-origin bars are made with cacao beans they roast and refine in their factory in East Lothian. Their inclusion bars are made with a pre-refined base of organic cacao mass from Peru. They explained why they adopted this strategy during our member-only Meet the Maker live event. They recently installed larger equipment that enables them to make all of their chocolate from the bean in much larger batches. In the future they plan to transition all of their bars to chocolate made with cacao roasted and refined in their factory.
I’ve provided notes about each chocolate along with my own recommendations on how to make the drinking chocolate (it’s easy!).
Mayan and Q’echi‘ communities surrounding lake Lachua in Guatemala grow this organic cacao inter-cropped with bananas, cardamom and coffee. This bar is classified as 100% cacao because the small amount of added sweetener comes from surplus cacao pulp juice that is freeze-dried and added to the chocolate. The sweetness level is minimal, resulting in a balanced flavor profile absent the bitter edge you might expect from a 100% (unsweetened) bar of chocolate.
Made with the most prized genetic varietal, Porcelana, this cacao from Venezuela is grown on small plots in an agroforestry environment. The pods are smooth-surfaced with white cacao seeds inside. By enjoying this chocolate, you help preserve a rare, heirloom varietal. The Venezuela Porcelana 85% won Silver in the 2023 European International Chocolate Awards.
An authentic marriage of chocolate and Scotch, this bar brings the funky, peaty-notes of Laphroaig single malt whisky from the Scottish island of Islay to rare heirloom cacao nibs from the Marañon canyon in Peru. Nibs are soaked in whisky and then the alcohol is allowed to evaporate before the nibs are refined into chocolate. This bar won a Silver in the 2024 British International Chocolate Awards.
The Haggis Spice bar is one of my favorite inclusion bars, incorporating the unique blend of spices used to make Haggis into Peru-origin chocolate. I find this bar truly addictive. Don’t worry, there’s no offal, just gluten-free oats and a mélange of spices including pepper, coriander, nutmeg, thyme, rosemary and salt. Give this bar a sniff before tasting and breathe in the rosemary notes.
A delicious mix of chocolate and warm winter spices makes this the perfect beverage to quaff on a cold, winter day. If you want a richer, more chocolaty beverage I recommend increasing the amount of chocolate to more than the two tablespoons suggested on the box. At my retail store in Seattle, Chocolopolis, we used a ratio of 40g of chocolate to 6 ounces of liquid to make rich cups of drinking chocolate for our customers.
Shake or stir the contents of the box before using. If you want to duplicate the ratio from Chocolopolis you could use 8 Tbsp chocolate for every 6 ounces of liquid. While this results in a more chocolaty beverage I found that when I used this ratio the texture of the drinking chocolate became too thick. Experiment to find the ratio that works best for you. If you’re dairy free you can substitute water or an alternative milk. Oat milk provides a particularly creamy texture that is reminiscent of drinking chocolate made with cow’s milk.
Optional: If you have a milk frother or immersion blender use it to create the froth prized by the Aztecs (and Chocolopolis customers).
