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Info Details
Country Spain   
Type Dark   (75%)
Strain Blend   
Source (Madagascar; Africa)
Flavor Crossover   
Style Rustic      
lo
med
hi
CQ
Sweetness
Acidity
Bitterness
Roast
Intensity
Complexity
Structure
Length
Impact
Chocolate disinformation. Tarakan might refer to the Borneo island volcano or the WWII battle in the South Pacific. But the beans in this bar are actually sourced from Africa.

A chocolate that neither surrenders nor seizes as it fights its way out in fleeing from the epicenter of combat. Not quite savage but can still cause major damage in a lustful frenzy to romance the pants.

Appearance   4.9 / 5
Color: UPS brown
Surface: spotless; volcanic swirls out back
Temper: polished
Snap: on pitch for 75% - sharp, clean & clear
Aroma   8.8 / 10
serious material: major leather & paper in a chocolate bog w/ fungi -> erupts soured cherry & barberry smoked by black tea, tobacco, & peat -> climbing vines, balsa, amyris & macaranga -> distant cocoa puffs & cookie dough jam into a yam
Mouthfeel   12.5 / 15
Texture: starts hard & fractious then calms w/ only minor grip
Melt: tranquilo - peaceable - om shanti (at times at odds w/ an incongruous flavor progression)
Flavor   45.6 / 50
runs-in a clone of the Aroma: barberry blazing thru peat-moss, mounting acidity to sour cherry carries thru the rest of the progression -> forested cocoa hangs in the recesses as mushrooms & amyris bark capture the acids, bringing them to ground soil (obvious methionyl acetate & 4-methylthio-butanol)... receding into background bitter of licorice-like balsa, but also the 1st real chocolate bang... a sort of dirty cluster bunker-bomb smokes up in the hole at which point there’s every reason & right for this to crack... instead clambers up & shoots off wine of golden raisin (the backcross to that fruit opener) for new laugh-inducing raptures that defy & belie the overall sapping earth-bound arc -> ever increasing CQ (chocolate quotient free of nuances) -> finally droops every last ounce into a buried ground-nut enrobed in pure darkness of the chocolate kind... & nothing anti-climatic about that
Quality   18.4 / 20
Shell-shocks with range & stamina of pressing aggression, followed by astonishing resilience – the power of blended cacáos; a garden-jungle that hits with muscular & irresistible force, picking fruits & stripping the bark off a sylvan veneer onto core cacáo wilderness that remains somehow evasive only because with so much going on (shades of S-B’s Extra Dark) it’s difficult to pin down since the foundation under the palate keeps shifting even as it tracks over a well-defined continuum.

Formulated in a blend made even more compatible in the processing: obvious Madagascar at the front matched with what fools of Indonesian or PNG where beans are traditionally pre-smoked in forced mechanical-drying due to climate conditions, until re-considering that Chocovic's deep-roasting house-style in tandem with such fire-dried beans would've just burn the bar down & leave only ashes.

Tarakan is a do-over of, to cite S-B again, Kumasi-Sambirano (foretold in the peat note which the Ghana crop in late '09 exhibited) but here with superior, almost seamless, integration.

ING: cocoa mass, sugar, cacáo butter, lecithin; CBS (Cocoa-Butter-Sugar ratio): 6:9:5

NOTE: This review covers the couverture; the eating bar is flatter & coffee-prone (higher mass-to-butter ratio + a greater proportion of West African Amelonado to Madagascar cacáo), then C'vic burns the flag down from there, whence the bar melts into the Void, rating a 7.12

Reviewed Spring 2010

  

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