85
by Lindt
Impact
A gorilla. Brutally elegant; chest-thumping King Kong exhaling thru the ashes of a forest-fire. But this is full of more than just ape shit. The bar that coins & defines chocolarity. Yeah, it’s manufactured by a huge global conglomerate, available at practically every corner deli, making artisan chocolatiers as well as neonate connoisseurs snigger – all at a fraction of the price – which just adds to the monsterous beauty of it.
Appearance 4.6 / 5
| Color: | African mahogany: black & brown w/ deep purple burgundy rays |
| Surface: | tough armor-all |
| Temper: | semi-lustrous |
| Snap: | clean snap castanet; coarsely sanded edge |
Aroma 8 / 10
rocks back w/ recoiling C-forces (cocoa-nut [cocoa pwdr, cocoa butter, coconut]) -> shoots into coffee w/ hazelnut sump & cedar box covered in vinyl -> forest fire & wet earth groundswell smoking in the rain; buckle-up & fasten your taste-buds
Mouthfeel 13.9 / 15
| Texture: | spherical roundness; expansive beyond the borders of the oral cavity... |
| Melt: | requires massive inputs to slip its crystal bonds but, once done, launches & smoothes out the glide path for flavor to come |
Flavor 44.6 / 50
girding cocoa (powder & power) -> sweet nutmeat (walnut) shadowed in a charred bitter flint -> gunpowder -> iron ore from beef -> faint red glimmers then... SHAZAM - a schisandra berry, the apparition in a deeply upfront chocolate ether surrounded by a smoked shadow; green coffeeberry the aft-math
Quality 17.1 / 20
Industrial eloquence. Ignore the PCCP (Politically-Correct Cocoa Police) that bust this bar on the grounds of its mass-production; the ones who practice Iranian-style agit-prop where The Ayatollah (i.e., alpha-taster) issues a fatwa & the faithful (RE: beta-cogs) fall in line to repent, a none-too-subtle suasion of censorship.
Fact is that chocolate, due to cacáo’s current genetic limits, is an artifice & only an extremely select number of truly great bars – e.g., Pralus 100 – can escape its pre-requisite for highly-processed refined white-sugar or alternative sweetener (the quintessential ‘necessary evil’) & often other additive boosters (vanilla, soy lecithin, butter) which belies the posturing of so-called “72% purists”.
As of Spring 2009, this 85 remains excellent for its class, & for what it is, such as it is: 1 dimensional but what a dimension! Chocolate in/chocolate out. Stunning in its simplicity; beautifully crushing in impact. A no nonsense, in-your-face, up-your-nose, down-your-throat blockbuster – so hardcore it just rips taste buds along the way with dense mass & bullet proof structure of gothic proportions holding up a tiny twinkle of stained glass in its constellation, seeing how it tastes sweeter than actually is (& granted, a portion feels Dutched for further control).
Lindt’s pride & joy; the explanation & exclamation why a blended bar can be so much greater than much of the current fashion fetish regarding single-bean origins.
ING: cocoa mass, cocoa powder, cacáo butter, sugar, vanilla
CBS ~3.5::3.5::1
Fact is that chocolate, due to cacáo’s current genetic limits, is an artifice & only an extremely select number of truly great bars – e.g., Pralus 100 – can escape its pre-requisite for highly-processed refined white-sugar or alternative sweetener (the quintessential ‘necessary evil’) & often other additive boosters (vanilla, soy lecithin, butter) which belies the posturing of so-called “72% purists”.
As of Spring 2009, this 85 remains excellent for its class, & for what it is, such as it is: 1 dimensional but what a dimension! Chocolate in/chocolate out. Stunning in its simplicity; beautifully crushing in impact. A no nonsense, in-your-face, up-your-nose, down-your-throat blockbuster – so hardcore it just rips taste buds along the way with dense mass & bullet proof structure of gothic proportions holding up a tiny twinkle of stained glass in its constellation, seeing how it tastes sweeter than actually is (& granted, a portion feels Dutched for further control).
Lindt’s pride & joy; the explanation & exclamation why a blended bar can be so much greater than much of the current fashion fetish regarding single-bean origins.
ING: cocoa mass, cocoa powder, cacáo butter, sugar, vanilla
CBS ~3.5::3.5::1