Mail me. Go home.
Greetings, brethren. And, yes, sistren. I suppose you're wondering why I've called you all here today. Chocolate will be tasted and rated on a ten-point scale with 1 being "hello? HELLO? Is this thing on?" and 10 being "where should we have our honeymoon?" The categories rated will be texture, chocolate experience, intruding flavours, aftertaste, and format (breakability and size). Anything else that comes to mind and seems important will be mentioned.
Who shall be our first contestant?
"Chocolove, Dark chocolate with cocoa beans, 60% cocoa content."First let's have a word about the packaging. This line is done up to look like a package of foreign extraction. It's got a thing like a diamond-shaped stamp, a "Belgian Chocolate" postmark, an embossed sploodge of what wishes it was red wax with a heart-shaped seal made of two Cs, one reversed to be the right half of the heart. There's a sticker like a contents comment or something saying the name of the bar and another one saying, and I'm not kidding, "Classic love poem inside." If that isn't enough for you, it has three Xs and two Os beneath the brand name. So this stuff had better be dark to make up for all the sugar on the wrapper. It's a good thing I'm not rating wrappers here.
It breaks nicely, with raised, rounded lumps in between the troughs or perforations. It's a slightly glossy look to it, which makes me think it'll be a fairly smooth experience. The lumps are slightly less than an inch square, so fit handily into your mouth without strain or the need to bite and risk losing some chocolate in the form of more crumbs. Let's give it an 8.
The texture of this puppy is rather hard to rate, since it's got the cocoa beans in there and all. If you let it melt a bit and soften so you can work around the crunchy bits, it's smooth, alright. Very smooth. I'll give it a 9.5 on this, withholding only a half point because nice as the beans are, they do not add to smoothness and that's what this category is all about. That is, in fact, why it's called "smoothness."
This is a very chocolatey chocolate, definitely firmly in the "dark" category. It's difficult to taste the chocolate apart from the beans, but if you think about it, that's a good thing. That means that the chocolate has enough of its own oomph so that it's not relying on the beans for its power. There's no distraction between the beans and the chocolate-- the beans are there just to give you a little variety in texture, not flavour. Worth every inch of an 8 here. Good follow-through and nice loft.
Intruding flavours? None that I can find. It starts dark and it stays dark. Very straight-forward, businesslike approach. "Hi, I'm Chocolate. Pleased to meet you. Let's get on with things." It's a little dry about things with the beans there, but that's why God gave you milk. Not to mix it with the chocolate itself, but just to help you out if you find a chocolate so dark you need some relief. I cannot refrain from a 10.
The aftertaste here is so dark and simple that there's no pain, no regret. You also get the experience of finding a few morsels of bean left behind that you can munch on for a while to ease the withdrawal symptoms. A 9, a very palpable 9. I'm not sure what a 10 in this category needs, but I'm hoping I'll know one when I taste it.
I would say this is worth an over-all score of 8.9. This is good stuff. If you're looking for a dark experience, this will do the job without hurting any fragile amateurs.