“Beer and chocolate make happy bedfellows!” says Dougal Sharp, founder and master brewer of Scottish craft beer brand Innis & Gunn. It’s why Innis & Gunn asked Edinburgh-based chocolate brand, Coco, to participate in Project Ampersand – an ambitious collaboration which brings together four fellow artisanal brands and gives them a simple brief: make something unique, using the beer maker’s unique brewing process for inspiration.
Coco is known for making premium artisan chocolate bars in exciting, unusual flavours – eg lavender, gin and tonic, and Earl Grey tea – all while using high-quality ingredients and fine South American cocoa. For Project Ampersand, Coco created three new chocolate bars and tasked three individual artists with designing each wrapper, again using the barrel for inspiration.
“Both Coco and Innis & Gunn are up for the challenge of exploring things outside of the norm,” says Sharp. “For us, they are doing something different in the world of chocolate and therefore we were keen to work alongside them.”
“Project Ampersand is a platform to showcase creativity and unique pieces of craftsmanship,” adds Calum Haggerty, owner and managing director of Coco. “Our work with the artists and other businesses that we collaborate with means we create something that is greater than ourselves, that is unique and that wouldn’t have existed without the input and inspiration from the Innis & Gunn Original barrel-ageing brewing process.”
The chocolate wrappers have been designed by Turner Furniture, Tom Pigeon, and David Mach, with each bringing an individual style and way of thinking to the project.
“What we like most about the three bars is what they represent as a collective – a cross-section of the creative arts,” Sharp explains. “From David Mach’s collage-style assemblage piece, to Tom Pigeon’s graphic block cuts, through to Chris Turner’s intricate parquetry, each piece represents a genuinely different interpretation of the role of the barrel.
“Ultimately, we felt that seeing the collaboration through this lens would deliver a far more interesting output and, crucially, one that is a true representation of not just both brands but all the artists involved,” Sharp continues. “It’s a sea of creative interpretation and differences, which is where we have also sat comfortably as a beer.”
To get a deeper understanding of each wrapper’s creative inception, we sat down with each of the artists to get them to explain their design, and what specific element of Innis & Gunn’s brewing process they used for inspiration.
Turner Furniture
Chris Turner has built a reputation for creating high-quality, bespoke furniture, and he prides himself on meticulous attention to detail in all of his pieces. He uses traditional cabinet-making processes and techniques with an emphasis on modern marquetry and contemporary style.
Talk us through the design
The design for Project Ampersand was based on the Turner Furniture signature geometric parquetry style and the specific piece of furniture, Cubist Credenza 77.
From the outset, a panel was to be created using a range of wood tones that would reflect Innis & Gunn’s limited edition VP03 imperial stout from the Vanishing Point series. The palette for this range is a simple black, white and rose gold.
What part of the brewing process informed your wrapper the most?
The packaging for VP03 and the brewing processes employed by Innis & Gunn to brew their beers. I did a lot of research and was intrigued by the unique “barrel into beer” maturation process.
This involves toasting the barrel pieces to a certain level and then immersing them into the beer to achieve the desired flavour profile. This is obviously in addition to the beer being matured physically in the oak barrels as well.
Each wood that Turner Furniture decided to use also has its own individual character, with the smoked oak reflecting the toasting of the barrel. Chocolate tones of the ale are reflected in the use of American walnut, with rippled sycamore and oak giving a hint of the vanilla and ripe fruit flavours.
Tom Pigeon
Tom Pigeon is a creative studio founded in 2014 by Kirsty Thomas. The studio works across design disciplines, including prints, jewellery and stationery as well as other creative commissions.
What was the thinking behind your wrapper?
We wanted to represent the different elements of the barrels and barrel-making process – and celebrate the traditional craft of the Speyside Cooperage.
The cooperage tour provided both the palette and the shapes that we could develop into a bespoke composition – the circles of barrel ends, the wooden staves, and the metal fixings that wrap around each barrel.
How did that manifest itself in the final design?
Our colour palette borrows from the tones and textures of the wood, the painted ends of vintage barrels as well as from the caramel and malt aromas of the beer and chocolate. We were also really excited to use original barrel staves to create hand-printed textures that we incorporated into the design.
David Mach
David Mach is one of the UK’s most successful and respected artists, known for his dynamic and imaginative large-scale collage, sculpture and installations using a wide range of materials, including coat hangers, matches and magazines.
What inspired this design and how did you go about creating it?
It’s a relatively simple collage, I’ve tried to keep it as simple as possible, as a matter of fact, bearing in mind there’s not a huge amount of room on the wrapper of a chocolate bar.
The main feature of the design is an angel, a cherub sitting on beer barrels set against some of the brown wrapping used for the chocolate bars and with the gold foil wrapping around and in between the whole thing. And I have included some of the ingredients Innis & Gunn use to flavour their beers sprinkled across the wrapper.
I guess that’s what the whole thing is about: flavour. Innis & Gunn makes fabulously interesting beers with very exciting flavours. Combining their product with Coco chocolate just seems like a heavenly combination, hence the angel/cherub against barrels.
For more information on Project Ampersand, visit innisandgunn.com/ampersand. The chocolate is available from cocochocolatier.com/collections/project-ampersand
