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Info Details
Country USA   
Type Dark   (70%; Lot 3/4/66)
Strain Hybrid   
Source Madagascar   (Sambirano Valley)
Flavor Twang   
Style New School      
lo
med
hi
CQ
Sweetness
Acidity
Bitterness
Roast
Intensity
Complexity
Structure
Length
Impact
Black & blue colored packaging for cacáo sourced from the Red Island. And kinda battered & bruised it is, a case of petty domestic violence. Nothing extreme, just a little slappin’ around & in the melee spilled juice sops over a wooden countertop that becomes the tongue which neighbors might take as maybe something light & kinky going on, along with bedtime reading material from the likes of Stendhal & Marquis de Sade.
Appearance   3.9 / 5
Color: milk choc brown / orange creamsicle
Surface: Sambirano Valley
Temper: soft-polish
Snap: high, tight, & sharp pitch; airholes along the break
Aroma   7.9 / 10
a cedar box: heavy spice/wood (incl eucalyptus), more than usual for the origin, as if hanging out on another island - São Tomé or better still Grenada - otherwise inconclusive data covered in butter: dirt, dim pine nut/pinesol, delicate off-odors (cheese, chert, green leaf); add buttermilk & caramel backing; along the Snap-edge more trad Mad perfumes: a single white grape, maybe one berry overhead, & a litchi
Mouthfeel   10.7 / 15
Texture: hard Wax Factor™
Melt: staggers, staged & ultimately anemic
Flavor   38.2 / 50
quite the light show (mostly lite & white); loads in cinnamon caramel (vanilla making its presence felt right off) -> warm cocoa-nut (pignoli) to cool acid (yellow plum) -> grows girrrlllie sweet & thin toward pineapple juice -> staying yellow... blank albino raspberry for lemon drop almost overtops its chocolate undersupport -> traditional Madagascar gin -> soft apple cider -> vinaigrette -> falls out cedar
Quality   14.6 / 20
"Darling" chocolate.

Classic A-B-A format which is great if this were a ganache & the brackets had more girth than the lean rails they are now, with that long crazy-quartz concourse in between, signs of easy-going roast & moderate conche applied to thoroughly fermented beans.

This amounts to the 4th year running that Amano has yet to get a handle on the origin. While a vast improvement over intitial batches (those were extreme citric wash-outs... particularly Batch #314166 just bleaching underlying components, poor Prototype Jrs.: over-acidulation, no counterbalance, meager body of steely cold entry -> low spearmint -> high citrus breeze -> portobello mushroom trying to fight passion fruit... (& loses) -> to vinegar residue). The updated version equals some more of the same though better harmonized. Still lacks however the clarity of Patric’s crystal palace where the acids vividly color the bar, & the chocolate bodyweight of Ambanja by Guittard or the Domori Madagared. Instead, the vanilla here & butter (probably from a completely different source) splotch the canvas, then smear the acidity into a murky yellowing... jaundiced in effect.

ING: cocoa mass, sugar, cacáo butter, whole vanilla; CBS (Cocoa mass / Butter / Sugar ratio) ~2:4:3

  

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