Tasting Notes: Hotel Chocolat – Purist 65% Dark 120 Conch Rabot Estate

These tasting notes are mainly as an aide memoir for me, as I can never remember which brands that I like, or perhaps more importantly do not like.   Over time I am hoping to build up a substantial database on my ingredients page.

At £5 for 70g this chocolate is certainly not cheap, but it is amazingly good.   Astonishing good.     I enjoyed it so much that I forced myself to ration it over a good 2 weeks, which was quite a feat of self restraint.

The beans are from Hotel Chocolat’s Rabot Estate, a 130 acre plantation in St Lucia.   The beans are Trinitario (also used by Green & Black’s).    The chocolate is conched for an astonishingly long 120 hours.   Conching is the process where chocolate is scraped and mixed to distribute the cocoa butter within the chocolate and where the particles are polished and smoothed.   During the process the chocolate is kept liquid due to heat generated from friction.    Typically a high class of chocolate will be conched for about 70 hours, lower grades for as little as 4 to 6 hours.   The smoothness is evident in this bar.

Flavourwise the pack describes “red fruit flavour notes slowly diminish to reveal oaked wine, citrus and a hint of spices”.   A pretty accurate description of what I tasted.  I immediately picked up on the wine and citrus notes.   Lovely texture and being only 65% it pleasantly slightly sweet.

The bar is available from Hotel Chocolat, from their range of 11 Purist bars.   Also available is a bar of the same chocolate with a 96 hour conch, it would be very interesting to taste them side by side to see if I could detect the difference.

Thank you to Hotel Chocolat for the free bar to sample.