The challenges of a high percentage Arriba manifest themselves in a far-from-great presentation, but given time and experience, this can transform into quite an excellent chocolate. Overall, the results are promising and show signs of potential for future batches.
Reviews
Alex Rast: 18-Oct-2005
| SCORES | Score/10 | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Aroma: | 8 | 10% |
| Look/snap: | 4.5 | 5% |
| Taste: | 3.5 | 35% |
| Melt: | 6 | 5% |
| Length: | 3 | 15% |
| Opinion: | 4 | 30% |
| Total/100: | 42 | 100% |
| INFO | |
|---|---|
| Best before: | |
| Batch num: | |
| Source: | |
| Supplied by: |
Disastrous interpretation of the fine Arriba bean is virtually a textbook example of how to ruin a great cacao. Virtually everything that can go wrong with this chocolate does, and the result is a chocolate that is completely unappealing: bitter, flat, coarse, and generally unpleasant. Might inspire the same morbid curiosity as staring at a car crash, but best handled in the same way as an accident: Keep Your Eyes on the Road, Move On, Don’t Stare.
There’s no attempt with this bar to win you over on visual appeal. It’s decidedly uneven, bubbly, with a dull, matte appearance and a dark, blackish colour. Rustic is one way, perhaps, to describe it, but it goes beyond the normal rough appearance to appear genuinely crude – sort of like a garage experiment. Aroma turns out to be the only area that doesn’t disappoint. Here one’s hopes are lifted: the impression is lively and spicy, cinnamon mixing with citrus, a felicitous and eye-opening combination. There’s a hint of a smoky, roasted presence and this in turn harmonises nicely with a marshmallowy hint reminiscent of Colombian beans.
Unfortunately the flavour destroys all hopeful expectations the aroma built up. There’s a brief, sour melon spike, and then the flavour becomes unrelentingly bitter and woody, perhaps with slight floral hints but not enough to offset the woody assault. Worse, it’s flat and uninteresting, quickly tapering off into nothing. Adding insult to injury, the texture is dry and rather dusty, not a good result and further reinforcing the feeling of chewing sandpaper.
There’s really no excuse for the poor outcome of this chocolate, not when you consider how at an identical percentage and with the same beans Slitti in Tropicale 90% achieves a chocolate approaching the sublime. It’s instructive to compare these bars side by side to understand how good, and how bad, a given bean can get. Plantations is capable of delivering good chocolate – their 100% is evidence of that. But this 90% formulation needs to go back to the drawing board: it’s just not worthy of the effort required to turn beans into chocolate.
