Color:	Perle Rare: darkest edge of twilight Minuit and Wanga Nègès: stays on the dark path despite almost half the bar of white sugar Paradis: reddens things up a bit
Surface:	thick ponderous feel
Temper:	murky sheen
Snap:	snub considering its thick pour

Perle Rare
barn on the farm, airs wondrously to light woods (bamboo, laurel) as well as offshoots such as twine / rope / sisal -> rises up melon before downshifting back to soft leather + a mere wisp of tobac -> re-airs a Chuao-level fruit plume on a foam rubber launch... rare in scent

Minuit
sweet sweat shack (improbable though it sounds)

Wanga Nègès
butterscotch maple

Paradis
caramelized butter & rubber

Texture:	minute grain...
Melt:	... swells thru & up

Perle Rare
cocoa mud pie, very dry, underscored by mild dirt bitter -> cocoa butter comes on to quasi-alkalize the foregoing -> rear clove -> carob -> coffee -> talc finish
Relatively nondescript other than staking its claim to low-sweet 90% cacáo content of some considerable lipid / fat (no added cocoa butter listed). Generally clean batch with nothing too objectionable
Ingredients: cocoa mass, rapadou sugar

Minuit
simple child's cocoa, sweet & vanilla... the lone intrinsic tag a nut inflection
Minuit, French for 'midnight'. Emphasis here on 'mid' as this bar represents a bit of a midpoint at 60% cacáo-content between utter darkness & milk chocolate. Translates into chocolate as 'innocuous' for innocents.
Ingredients: cocoa mass, sugar, vanilla

Wanga Nègès
55% cacáo-content
milk, caramel combine for Milk Duds^® FXs
Short-lived but sweet 'n simple
Ingredients: cocoa mass, rapadou sugar, milk, cocoa butter

Paradis
47% cacáo-content
very much in the mold of Wanga Nègès (above) except malted, sweeter, & (slightly) longer
Ingredients: cocoa mass, sugar, milk, cocoa butter

The payment plan --
Growers earning livable wages means paying more for beans. And that hurts the bottom line. So the M.O. = preach premium farm gate prices while simultaneously paying growers peanuts for the fruits of their labor because ‘that’s just what the market will bear’. Particularly acute now that the world commodity price for cocoa dropped roughly a third off its peak about 2 years ago.

Back then the PR engines of Big Choc announced, due to climate change & structural inefficiencies, doom ‘n gloom… severe shortages loom ahead…. coming soon. So what happened?

The solution happened: here farmer, plant these “super-seeds” (typically vapid clones that breed like weeds) for higher yield, bending the productivity curve upward. Field hands work harder, pick more pods off trees, scoop more cacáo seeds to compensate, just to get back to even. Under such conditions, many stakeholders / landholders (largely men) beat it to the cities, pursue greater opportunity costs there. They often leave women behind in the village. Now the industry can tout programs which “empower women”. Beautiful. Meanwhile, a certain glee prevails in C-suites & on acctg apps. Not everyone but more than enough to make it reality. Also, not to be discounted, low inflation & cratered commodities generally.

askanya strives to sidestep all or most of this mishegas with an in-country value-added model to redefine chocolate's fortunes. It selects from the 3,000+ member co-op Fédération des Cacaoyères du Nord in northern Haiti..

The Dark bars demo some ways to go yet while askanya displays good proportionality in the Milk Chocolate category. Additionally, the company offers an exposé on less refined cane sugar & the effect that that has on flavor outcome.

Reviewed January 4, 2018