Meet Irish Sweethearts Hazel Mountain Chocolate

Kasha and John, Hazel Mountain Chocolate.

“I always had the feeling that there was something special about this place,” Kasha Connolly tells me on a bright, spring-like day in County Clare. The place in question is her husband John’s family farm, nestled in the foothills of what locals call the ‘hazel mountains’. The farm overlooks beautiful Galway Bay on the Wild Atlantic Way and nearby, numerous walking trails lead to the Burren and Cliffs of Moher UNESCO Global Geopark. With its lunar limestone terrain, the Burren is one of Ireland’s most captivating, evocative landscapes.  

It may come as no surprise, then, that the area’s scenic beauty inspired the couple to open a business dedicated to creating a famously romantic food – chocolate! Kasha and John launched Hazel Mountain Chocolate on Valentine’s Day in 2014, Ireland’s first bean-to-bar chocolate factory, featuring both a charming visitor centre and cosy cottage café. Drawing on baking skills handed down by Kasha’s mother and her grandfather – who was a professional baker - the couple lovingly restored a farmhouse cottage passed down from John’s grandparents. If that sounds like something out of a fairytale, it only becomes more enchanting when you learn that the couple first met in that very cottage on a snowy New Year’s Eve.  

In love with the Irish landscape 

Kasha was a girl with a plan: to travel to various English-speaking countries to fine-tune her English before returning to teach in her native Poland. But Ireland got under her skin, and she had already stayed longer than planned. In Galway on New Year’s Eve, herself and a friend decided to take a tour to the Cliffs of Moher, with an optional guided hike in the Burren. 

Enter John, who had recently returned from working as an outdoor guide for people with disabilities in Alaska. His plan was to transform his grandparents’ old cottage into a walking centre, from which he could guide visiting hikers. 

“It was just me and my friend on the tour and doing the hike that day,” Kasha recalls. “I remember John coming onto the bus to get his two hikers, and all I remember is his hat and his blue eyes.”  

The spark was instant, and when they returned after the hike to the cottage for tea and apple pie, the pair connected on Facebook under the pretext of John sharing recommendations for where to party in Galway that night.  

Hazel Mountain Chocolate

A move to the Burren 

After a year of long-distance dating, Kasha found herself moving to the Burren to give things a go. “John had a job [as a hiking guide] but I was trying to figure out what I would do for a living,” she recalls. When she started making one or two extra cakes for the hikers, it reconnected her to her own third-generation baking heritage. 

“I do really feel that it was all meant to be,” Kasha tells me. “Until I moved over here, I didn’t realise that baking was something that I really loved doing. I didn’t see these skills that I had.” 

As they opened the cottage as a cafe to the public, little by little, Kasha’s passion and talent blossomed. “I started working with chocolate,” she remembers “and I realised, wow, this is something really interesting that I would love to explore further – and I did!” 

Kasha signed up for a chocolate-making course. Shortly after, she and John realised they could expand the original café enterprise into something much bigger. By spring 2014, the couple were ready to officially relaunch the café as Hazel Mountain Chocolate, with an old farm outbuilding converted into a kitchen workshop for producing artisan chocolate using simple, sustainable, ethically sourced ingredients and Irish dairy milk. 

At the very start, they used couverture chocolate, but the educational opportunity of the visitor centre quickly caught this trained teacher’s imagination. “We realised we would love to make the chocolate on site from scratch,’ Kasha says, “to provide that element of showing people the real production of food from start to finish.”  

They also loved the idea of this small, ancient family farm connecting and supporting other small family farms growing cocoa beans across the Atlantic, even if it was not easy to know where to start. “At the time it was a big challenge to source the cocoa beans,” she remembers. 

Thankfully the world is a smaller place when you’re Irish and connected into a network of diaspora. John’s sister, who had lived in the USA too, had American-Cuban friends who introduced them to small family farmers in Cuba.  

Because the cocoa beans grow beside banana plantations, they have a natural vanilla/banana flavour that, Kasha explains, makes them a perfect complement to the Irish dairy used to make Hazel Mountain’s milk chocolate. 

"They’re just the best beans we’ve ever had to do milk chocolate. We don’t even add vanilla to our chocolate, so you’re really just tasting the flavour of the cocoa bean.” 

Galway Food Tour, Hazel Mountain Chocolate.

Growing the business 

The dream chocolate factory continues to grow, with a shop and truffle-making room in Galway city and a new truffle-making room at the Burren Hazel Mountain headquarters, which is soon to host an upgraded visitor centre celebrating the region’s unique landscape and Wild Atlantic Way coastline. Today, visitors can pre-book a 45-minute guided tour that takes them through every stage of the chocolate-making process, from roasting, cracking, and winnowing, to stone-grinding and tempering.   

Although they now employ 25 people, the couple’s partnership remains at the heart of the business. John oversees the day-to-day operations of Hazel Mountain – such as sourcing the beans and other logistics - while Kasha acts as “the creative engine” of the business.  

Her most recent creative project allows Kasha to lean into what really makes this place special, she explains, by hosting “Food for Stories”, an online series of beautifully shot ten-minute cooking demos and interviews.  

“I always had the feeling that this landscape was really bringing people closer, somehow, and then with our chocolate in the middle of it – there is something magical about all of these elements together.”