Never open a review with a cliche, right? Well, rules are made to be broken, so …
I know they say you can’t judge a book by its cover. Turns out you also can’t judge a chocolate by its wrapper.
The other day a chocolate bar mysteriously appeared on my desk. Not my GMR desk, but my day-job desk. It was called Purple Haze, 75% Bean To Bar Dark Chocolate. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen these in a store or two around these parts, and totally dismissed them, because of the package design. The color, the psychedelic flowers, and especially the typeface!
About the only only comestible that I like more than chocolate is beer, and it’s subject to a similar phenomenon. There are so many artisans making the stuff these days that you can’t reasonably keep up. And even though many of the smaller makers are some of the best and most adventurous, it’s easy to overlook them because they often lack professional design and marketing skills. I’ve gotten too accustomed to trying products from small local breweries, wineries, and chocolatiers with high hopes, only to find their products aren’t quite ready for prime time.
So here we have a bar from Lillie Belle Farms, in of all places Central Point, Oregon. I’ve been to Central Point, back when if you blinked you’d miss it. It’s a little burg outside of Medford, in the scenic and rustic Rogue Valley where I grew up. Home of the Crater High School Comets. One of the most vivid memories of my childhood came when I was in junior high school and I witnessed the Grants Pass Cavemen beat Crater on the football field, 81-0.
So, am I expecting a chocolate bar from Central Point, in a package that looks like a refugee from 1968, to be any good? (Rhetorical question.)
Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be one of the best chocolate bars I’ve had in a long time.
Now, I don’t know about “bean to bar,” particularly in the wake of the Mast Brothers scandal. But this one claims to have cacao sourced from Sur del Lago in Venezuela. I’ve had chocolate labeled as Venezuelan, and this is in line with the flavors I recall. Once you unwrap this, it’s an upretentious bar with an earthy but not overpowering aroma of cacao.
The bar isn’t scored, so it breaks in random pieces. When you bite into it, it gives just slightly but doesn’t crumble. Starting from room temperature it takes only a few seconds to begin releasing those pleasant cacao esters into your mouth and nose. It’s smooth, medium rich and earthy, surprisingly delicate with a hint of cinnamon, and not a lingering aftertaste. It has just a slight bitterness, as it should with 75% cacao content and just a bit of sugar.
Purple Haze is, simply, a high-quality chocolate experience, unpretentious but just plain good on all points. Bean to bar or not, this chocolate seems to have been handled with skill and respect.
You can learn about Lillie Belle’s award-winning chocolates at their website, where you can also order them for quite reasonable prices. This experience has left me definitely wanting more, so I’ll just have to swallow my elitist design principles and take the plunge.
