An utterly average bar light-years away from its far superiour origin stablemates. If Neuhaus shows every evidence of care and quality in its origin chocolates, this one shows every evidence of mass-production and cost sensitivity. In fairness, it’s not, perhaps, terrible, but there’s nothing commendable about it either and tasting this chocolate and one of their origin bars side by side makes one wonder how they can issue from the same company. Given the exceptional character of its higher-end line, there is no good reason to buy this chocolate from Neuhaus.
Right from the start things look unpromising for this chocolate. It’s got a dark brown colour, and worse is flat and dull. Moulding, at least, appears to be reasonable but on the whole there seems to have been more an effort to speed these bars down the production line than make them look pretty.
Aroma, too, is more of a deterrent than an enticement. Most of it is dark coffee – indicative of beans roasted within an inch of their lives. There’s also a bizarre dusty nuance – or perhaps lint, almost as if this chocolate had been through the clothes dryer. At least the flavour salvages some respectability – there’s an initial hit of fruitiness in a currant burst. But then earthy and coffee flavours take over, and overriding it all is a powerful and unrelenting bitterness that proves impossible to ignore. What you have here is self-evidently bulk chocolate.
Texture is also on a bulk level, perhaps slightly above absolutely average, smooth without being remarkable. But it’s very dry, and in this case perhaps more cocoa butter might have at least gotten rid of the worst of the bitterness. It’s a bar that shrieks of careless, rushed mass production, with little thought or effort given to quality. How can a producer manage to make such a totally average chocolate as this one, on the one hand, and such totally superb chocolates as its origin chocolates, in the same line? Impossible to say. This seems to be a chocolate at the focal point of an ethical crisis.
