A sweet Brst of joy is opening in downtown Jasper
Whenever Jess Birkle goes out to eat with her husband, she always turns to the menu’s dessert section first.
“I always have dessert brought out before my meal,” she laughed.
Jess wants to ensure her entrée doesn’t spoil her sweet tooth.
That tooth even guides her cooking at home. “I love to cook, but everything is sweet,” Jess explained. “Like, even my chili has brown sugar in it.”
Jess is also entrepreneurial. In middle school, she had a notebook full of business ideas.
“I would just dream of all these businesses I wanted to create,” she said.
Over the years, she’s followed that entrepreneurial spirit. Soon after high school, while managing ad sales for a local newspaper, she opened a bakery specializing in cakes and cheesecakes in her hometown of Decatur. Eventually, she moved on from there and began working in real estate, opening a charity-based real estate company in Noblesville. Since moving to Jasper in 2019, she and her husband, Joey, have operated a mortgage brokerage on the Square.
But over the past few years, Jess has been reconsidering her career path. “Ever since I moved to Jasper, I have been praying nonstop, asking God to just lead me in a direction,” she said. I’ve always loved business, but there was nothing that came to mind that I was passionate about, that I was excited to turn into a business.”
Amid tragedy, clarity can emerge. Over the past two years, Jess has experienced the loss of her grandmother, who raised her and most recently, her mother, Tonya, who was disabled much of her life due to Crohn’s disease. The many years of Crohn’s had ravaged her mom’s body, and she succumbed to complications from the disease in October while in the hospital.
It seemed God began showing her some direction while sitting in emergency rooms with her mother over the past year. As she was waiting, as you do in emergency rooms, she learned about this chocolate bar, the Dubai Knafeh Pistachio Chocolate Bar—a chocolate bar packed with toasted kataifi-covered pistachio cream that was blowing up on social media.
The viral chocolate bar was as equally enticing to her sweet tooth as it was hard to get due to its extreme popularity. But it opened her eyes to new possibilities as the viral bar led her deeper into an online chocolate rabbit hole.
“I was just fascinated by the possibilities and idea of everything you could do with chocolate,” she said. “I started studying it like crazy.”
It helped to pass the time in the emergency room with her mother. “It gave me something to be passionate about and excited about while going through everything with her,” Jess explained.
She took classes to learn how to work with chocolate and began researching chocolate-making supplies and equipment. She discovered that her baking experience was useless when it came to chocolate.
“It is a whole different world. It’s very difficult to work because of the tempering process,” she explained. “You get the chocolate one degree off (heat) and it ruins it.”
Maybe it was a coping mechanism for her mother’s continued decline—the act of creating something sweet that could brighten the day just a bit—but Jess would come home from the hospital and spend hours practicing and working on her chocolate bar. “I would stay up until three or four in the morning just trying to get it right,” she said.
When she finally got it, it was unlike anything she had ever tasted. “When you think of chocolate, you normally think of the stuff you get in grocery stores, but most of that is not even chocolate,” she explained, pointing to the filler ingredients in most chocolate.
“It was really like trying chocolate for the first time because it has such a high cocoa butter content,” she said about the high-quality chocolate she uses in her bars.
Because of the high level of cocoa butter and her perfected tempering process, the bars have a glossy shine and a crisp snap when broken.
With the chocolate perfected, she began experimenting with different fillings, attempting to find the best flavors, textures and stability to create the desserts she envisioned. Through the process, her husband and kids served as her test audience. But, she was looking for a more objective opinion before she could feel confident she had a great product. She needed someone who wouldn’t have a problem providing constructive criticism.
That turned out to be her mother-in-law, Diana Birkle.
“She’s a fantastic cook and she is a tough cookie. She knows what she likes and doesn’t like,” Jess said. “I knew if she would give this a stamp of approval, I was really on to something.”
Jess had created a caramel apple-filled Brst bar that her family loved. “I took it over to my mother-in-law, and I was nervous,” she said. “I told her I had something for her to try.”
As Jess handed her the chocolate bar, she told Diana to discard the idea of a chocolate bar and think of it as a dessert.
Diana took a bite and simply said, “Damn good!”
That was all Jess needed. She had already landed on the name of her new chocolate company, Chocobrst, and transformed the basement into her test kitchen. With Diana’s damn good stamp of approval, she was ready to bring her new business forward in September.
Each bar is about a half-pound of filled chocolate that snaps open and bursts with flavor—Chocobrst. She likes to say that a bar will feed a family of four, but you can also wait until everyone in the house is asleep and sneak it for yourself.
Using social media, she began spreading the word on her new Brst creations, which included flavors like cherry amaretto, peanut butter crunch, and banana caramel craze, as well as more traditional chocolate bar styles she calls Bites.
A simple TikTok post by her daughter, Hallie, blew up, and through that and her advertising, Jess quickly garnered about 200 orders in the first month after announcing they were available on Sept. 10. “I was blown away,” she said.
But that first shipment was a disaster. “I quickly learned it was difficult to ship chocolate in 95-degree weather,” she laughed.
Every single chocolate bar melted. But her customers were forgiving, and she quickly devised a better shipping solution. “Everything got there perfectly,” Jess said. “I was so embarrassed, but they were all so supportive.”
That growth continued into October, and with it, the realization that they needed to move the business out of the basement of their Jasper home. With the office they were leasing on the Square for their mortgage business, Jess and Joey felt it would be a great fit for ChocoBrst to use as its base of operations.
They are renovating the space and adding a chocolate bar production line. When completed, along with a wall of chocolate treats and mindblowing hot chocolate, visitors to the new store will be able to watch the production of the ChocoBrst bars while indulging in the wonderful smell and flavors permeating the Square.
Optimistically, Jess would like to open the new location before Christmas, but realistically, she feels it will likely open early in the new year. She has faith that things will go well. So many inexplicable things have happened to bring ChocoBrst to life that she knows this is what she is supposed to be doing.
“I don’t really understand what the big plan is, the big picture, what God has in mind,” Jess said. “But I do know God wants this business open because it is all coming together. I don’t think I’m the most qualified person to put together a chocolate company but the way it is happening has been so cool to be part of.”
For now, you can order your sweet ChocoBrst indulgences online from a revolving list of flavors here. Options will be updated monthly with new flavors and fan favorites. You can also follow ChocoBrst on Facebook and TikTok.
