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.
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
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