Color:	on the cool side, purple cast into medium-dark brown w/ just a splash of thrill-seeking red
Surface:	always a Theo specialty: perfection; rarely gets better
Temper:	natural relaxed beauty
Snap:	bit of a hollow gourd

&dank forest & wet horses dropping butter-cheese funk punctured by green olives chayote -> latent but good airborne chocolate-licorice

Texture:	hi-level crystallization
Melt:	velvet meltdown until gripping finish

soiled cocoa -> sundry mushrooms (woods ear / cremini) cross-fertilized w/ a vengenace by iron-rich beef hemolgobin -> butter comes to the rescue to tamper down & sop up the dripping blood -> black olive overshadows dying jocoté (hog plum) -> reprises more beef over a plank of koa haole (lead tree) waxed in candle stick tree (Parmentiera cereifera) -> catechins & epicatechins puckers out to witch hazel; after-taste... walnut shells & monkey-pot nuts

Good control inspite of the flavor profile. Max conching (felt in the lush stuff of the Texture) ensures a rather simple taste, shortened length, & blunts, if not altogether eliminates, the esters so there’s really nothing to leaven a plodding chocolate with a hefty stock of polyphenols, rendering a surly bean in character with Costa Rican genotypes. Also noteworthy that Theo eased up on the roast - milder than its usual house style - perhaps contraindicated given the results here (though possibly influenced by the De Vriesian standard for the origin which is similarly roasted).

A marked improvement however, such as it is, over Theo’s other 91% - from Venezuela.

ING: cocoa mass, sugar, cacáo butter, vanilla; CBS (Cocoa mass/Butter/Sugar ratio): ~5:5:1

Reviewed Summer 2010