You might say chocolatier and founder of Deiter’s Chocolates, Adrienne Johnson-Conway’s relationship with the Old-World Bavarian chocolate she learned to love and create started in the cradle. “My Mom grew up on East Colfax near Erich Dietrich’s original store that later moved to Evans,” she says. “My parents had been buying chocolates from him for years. I have a vague memory of the old shop and when I was born, Erich made the chocolates for my christening. For me, it represents family and holidays. The wonderful thing about chocolate is that if things are going great—excellent; if things are going not so great—also excellent.”
Johnson-Conway grew up on Capitol Hill, attended Dora Moore Elementary, Morey Middle School and George Washington High School, where she became interested in ceramics. She earned an art degree in ceramics from Metro State and took a few months off to travel with a friend around Europe before returning to Denver to make a go of it as a working ceramics artist.
“Like most artists, I spent the bulk of my time cobbling together various jobs,” she says. “I did art shows, tried to get my work into galleries, worked for various artists and started teaching at the Art Students League.”
One day while having breakfast with her parents at the iconic Dietrich’s Chocolates & Espresso on East Evans, Johnson-Conway struck up a conversation with Erich, who offered her a job waiting tables on weekends. From there, she started bagging candy during the week and the arrangement evolved over time into an informal apprenticeship. “I started asking him questions about making chocolate and after a while he realized I was really interested,” she says. “First, I learned how to make nonpareils, which are little discs of piped chocolate with sprinkles on one side, and then I asked him for more and more information and he continued showing me. I was there for 15 years. When I find a space that fits, I definitely tend to stick with it. I liked the shop, the chocolate, Erich and the people. And it fit together with my art career pretty well.”
When Erich decided to retire in December 2015, Johnson-Conway took a leap of faith and decided to buy the store, preserving Erich’s legacy while harnessing all she’d learned from him to create new confections designed to appeal to yet another generation. “I thought it would be a shame for the Denver metro area to lose this fantastic, family-owned business,” she says. “The tradition would be lost and it just didn’t compute for me. I liked the idea of bringing something a little different to the table, too. Keeping the Bavarian-style favorites, the handcrafted truffles, turtles, nut clusters and nonpareils that are more rustic and subtly flavored, but also dialing it up a bit.”
She and her partner Hans Kuhlmann, who she met when he was a customer of Dietrich’s, bought the contents of the building and reopened as Deiter’s Chocolates in time for Valentine’s Day 2016. “Erich was attached to his name—rightly so—and I think wanted to make a clean break. But the name Deiter’s means something to both me and my partner. On my end, it’s meant as a nod to Erich for teaching me everything I know about chocolate. Deiter is a kind of a nickname for Dietrich and my partner has several generations of Dietrichs in his family and their nicknames are Deiter.”
Kuhlmann attends primarily to the business side of Deiter’s, while Johnson-Conway remains hands-on with the chocolate-making, although roles often overlap and the pair enjoys collaborating. “Just recently, he said, you should try taking those little peanut butter pretzels and dip them in chocolate but I wasn’t sure how to deal with the peanut [allergy] issue. And then I recently thought you just need to sandwich them like a turtle. So we’re testing out these peanut butter turtles, little bites with a wafer of chocolate on either side that are really good. So, sometimes he’s giving me chocolate ideas and sometimes I’m saying, what if we advertised this?”
“At cocktail parties people say, ‘You do what? Did you bring any chocolate?’ I have dilemmas when I go to a party deciding what to bring, but tend to lean toward a half pound of milk and half pound of dark nonpareils. They’re so simple but so good to pop in your mouth and take the time to really enjoy. That’s another thing I love about this business. The world is just so big and fast, it’s nice to have a small place where you can just come in and slow down a bit ... to appreciate chocolate and focus on your grace.”
Although forced to put her ceramics career aside, Johnson-Conway finds formulating new chocolates equally inspiring. “I keep on waiting to start dreaming about pottery at some point but I haven’t yet,” she says. “Making chocolate is very tactile and creative and really satisfies that part of me. I do like a pop of flavor in the chocolates I make. We’re still doing all of Erich’s favorites like the gingerbread truffle, called “lebkuchen,” but I’m definitely also tweaking things and wanting to engage the current generation’s love for the sweet, salt and crunch with potato chip bars and hand-dipped, chocolate potato chips or the crunchy and chewy texture that a fruit-and-nut cluster brings.”
Deiter’s partners with local businesses such as Declaration Brewery, Blue Moon RiNo and Bear Creek Distillery to make chocolates that incorporate beer and spirits. “We have a six pack of cocktail truffles meant to capture a moment in time,” she says. “We’re developing candies that we make regularly but also special offerings. We were just playing around with a blueberry cheesecake, white chocolate truffle. We do a lot of beta testing, especially during the summer. When it comes to chocolate, I like texture a lot, so when I infuse a chocolate with tea, instead of pulling it back out, I like to leave the texture of the tea leaf in.”
Johnson-Conway also found a way to lure more people into the shop during off-season warm weather for frozen hot chocolate, available in four flavors: peppermint, Aztec, dark chocolate and Whiskey Barrel coffee. “It’s a cold brew coffee with nitro in it, so a 12-ounce cup is pretty high octane,” she says. “We definitely tend to be sort of neighborhood-centric and Colorado-proud in the products we carry.”
Deiter’s carries a dozen or so Colorado Wines, for example, and partners with sommeliers from Bottle Shop 33 on South Gaylord to provide wine-chocolate tastings. “The wine and chocolate pairing events are meant to be more of self-exploration to find out what you do and don’t like,” Johnson-Conway says. “People celebrate birthdays, bachelorette parties, or just come together as friends. In the smaller classes, everyone’s welcome to sort of wine and chocolate geek out.”
While the challenges of running a small business have gotten considerably easier a year-and-a-half in, she admits juggling many new roles can prove challenging. “I have a lot of hats to wear, from dealing with a water main break or some other calamity, to carving out enough time for office work and email, while still giving room to formulating new chocolates.”
Johnson-Conway most enjoys meeting others as passionate as she is for chocolate and creating new, unexpected flavors that blow customers away. “Right now we’re beta testing a spicy mango chili and a tart, tangy balsamic cherry truffle, always trying to go for unique flavor but also balance. When I tell people about them they’ll inevitably say, “Ooh—that sounds delicious!”
And things are getting easier. “The first year, I might as well have put a cot in the back room,” she says. “But now I strive for more work-life balance and can mostly leave it at work. And in the summer, when it’s quieter, I can focus on exploring more themes for the holiday season.”
Her parents are thrilled with the new shop and she’s found being a chocolatier a great conversation starter. “At cocktail parties people say, ‘You do what? Did you bring any chocolate?’ I have dilemmas when I go to a party deciding what to bring, but tend to lean toward a half pound of milk and half pound of dark nonpareils. They’re so simple but so good to pop in your mouth and take the time to really enjoy. That’s another thing I love about this business. The world is just so big and fast, it’s nice to have a small place where you can just come in and slow down a bit...to appreciate chocolate and focus on your grace.”
Author Susan Dugan’s wide range of work includes newspaper and magazine articles, personal essays and fiction. An active volunteer in local schools, she has taught creative writing and brought authors into classrooms. If you know a member of our community who is contributing in extraordinary ways and might make a good subject for this column, email Susan at sadugan@gmail.com.
