Chocolate of the Day
Honoka'a Chocolate
55% Cacao Drunken Goat Milk Chocolate (bar)
Good ++
Weight: 1 oz. (28.3 g.) / 2 oz. (57 g.) in total bar
Calories: 180 calories in 1/2 bar
Cost: $16.00 for 1 bar
Purchased from: Honoka'a Chocolate, online order
Aloha and welcome to Day #3 of Chocolate and Spirits Theme Week.
Today's 55% Cacao Drunken Goat Milk Chocolate (bar) was from Honoka'a Chocolate (Honoka'a, HI). Honoka'a is a small town on the green, lush Hamakua coast on the northeast side of the Big Island of Hawaii.
This bar was made with "Kahlua infused Ecuadorian (Camino Verde Fermentary) cacao with a hint of organic cane sugar and goat milk." To make this barrel-aged bar, cacao nibs and Kahlua were "aged in oak barrels for 4 to 5 months before processing into chocolate."
Aroma notes included: rich milk chocolate (mild, with a refreshing clean edge to it).
Texture: thick and creamy, with a luxuriously thick mouthfeel and clean melt. Very faint, fleeting (barely there) astringency in the finish.
Flavor notes included: dark milk chocolate with very faint caramel. I did sense a super faint plant stalks and muffled wood from the barrel aging process; but these notes were so subtle as to be undetectable. There were no strong acid or bitter notes.
For a 55% chocolate, this was not too sweet (thank you). The relative lack of sugar meant it was easier to taste the subtle nuances of flavor in the chocolate and the milk.
I appreciated the creamy texture; the clean taste of the goat milk; the delicate caramel; the short list of ingredients; and a wee bit of intriguing complexity.
It felt like taking a quiet walk outside in the fog, with clean, recently rain-washed air. There was no strong weather here; but it was a refreshing, interesting walk well worth taking.
I recommend adding this bar to a dark milk tasting flight (side-by-side tasting with other dark milk chocolate bars). This bar might help show tasters that the type and quality of the milk used in a chocolate bar does matter. And that dark milks don't always have to be very sweet to be enjoyable.
Ingredients: Ecuadorian cacao (Camino Verde Fermentary), organic turbinado cane sugar, organic goat milk.
Allergen-related information: Contains: Dairy
No comments:
Post a Comment