Make Your Own Chocolate: An Invitation to Our Bean to Bar Workshop

There is a moment in every Bean to Bar workshop when something shifts. You've been working with the cacao — roasting, winnowing, grinding — and then the chocolate starts to come together. The smell changes. The texture changes. And you realise, perhaps for the first time, that you are actually making chocolate. Not assembling it. Not decorating it. Making it, from a raw bean, with your own hands.

That moment is why we run the Bean to Bar Chocolate Making Workshop. And we'd like to invite you to experience it.

What Happens in the Workshop

Our Bean to Bar Chocolate Making Workshop takes place in our manufactory on Tanners Moat in York — the same space where we make all of our single-origin chocolate. You won't be watching a demonstration. You'll be doing it yourself, guided by our chocolate makers at every stage.

The workshop takes you through the key stages of the chocolate making process:

• Roasting — learning how roast temperature and duration shape the flavour of the finished chocolate
• Winnowing — cracking and separating the cacao nibs from the husk, just as we do for every bar we make
• Grinding & Refining — transforming nibs into smooth chocolate mass, understanding how particle size affects texture
• Tempering — the critical process that gives chocolate its gloss, snap, and smooth melt
• Moulding & Finishing — pouring your tempered chocolate into moulds and creating your own finished bar to take home

Along the way, you'll taste at each stage — from raw nib to finished chocolate — building an understanding of how every decision in the process shapes what ends up in the bar.

What You'll Take Home

Your own chocolate bar, made entirely by you from the bean. And something harder to package but equally valuable: a genuine understanding of what goes into the chocolate you eat, and a new way of tasting it.

Participants often tell us that they can never look at a chocolate bar the same way again after the workshop. That's exactly the point.

Who Is It For?

The Bean to Bar workshop is for anyone with curiosity and enthusiasm — no prior experience required. It's a wonderful experience for food lovers, for people who want to understand craft chocolate more deeply, for those considering the Crafting Chocolate Learning Program as a next step, and for anyone who simply wants to do something genuinely different and memorable in York.

It also makes an exceptional gift. Our chocolate experience e-vouchers are available for all our workshops — a present that gives someone not just chocolate, but the knowledge of how to make it.

In the Heart of York's Chocolate Heritage

Making chocolate in York carries a weight that it doesn't carry anywhere else in Britain. You are working in a city that has been at the centre of the chocolate industry for three centuries — where the traditions of the Rowntrees and the Terrys are still present in the streets around you. Our manufactory sits close to where Henry Isaac Rowntree built his first factory on the banks of the Ouse. The craft you're learning in our workshop is the same craft that built this city's identity.

That context doesn't make the chocolate taste different. But it does make the experience of making it feel like something more than a workshop.

Ready to make your own chocolate? Book your place on the Bean to Bar Chocolate Making Workshop here. Gift vouchers are available via our Chocolate Experience e-Vouchers page.