2010 March | Choqoa

Last week I visited Antwerp’s finest coffee bar: Caffènation. Rob, the owner, is super passionate about coffee and I’ve seen him building up his wonderful cosy, quality coffee bar for several years now. He was eager to find out about my chocolate, so eventually last week I dropped one of those famous Choqoa Discovery Packs at the famous barista place.

His fellow coffee servants swiftly gathered around the mysterious black bag and upon seeing the contents, they surely had hard times waiting for opening that newly discovered black gold. Eventually however, the proof is in the tasting, and seeing some of Belgium’s most famous coffee cup champs rolling their eyes on munching these wonderful chocolate bars, was a pleasure all mine!

Rob mailed me some days later with more detailed notes, so here it is: the uncensored Caffènation review on some of the ‘Selected by Choqoa’ chocolate bars. It’s great to see how people take a personal twist on taste

François Pralus – Madagascar: 7/10 Citric, a very ‘natural’ taste, somewhat ‘beastly’ even, needs time to adapt yourself too it.
Bonnat – Trinité: 9/10 Very sweet and buttery. Gives a sensation of melted chocolate with orange and cherry. Delicious!
Bonnat – “Hacienda El Rosario” : 6.5/10 Somewhat in between, slightly too powerful on the palate en brute. Very complex though.
François Pralus – Venezuela : 5/10 Very ‘bitter’ and pretty harsh.
Michel Cluizel – Vila Gracinda : 9/10 My favourite. Starts really creamy and evolves into huge piles of tropical fruit with fresh made chocolate mousse.

A big thanks to sharing your impressions and feel free to follow the Caffènation blog. I’m looking forward to publish many more responses from people who rediscover superb chocolate with Choqoa!

Wrapping up our second tasting this year, again it’s an evening to which I can look back loaded with sensations and discoveries that are changing people’s mind on dark origin chocolate. In our beautiful loft-lounge style setting I introduced the cacao harvest & production process, to show people how careful this pretty sexy tree needs to be treated to give us such fine chocolate. Every tasting session is somewhat different and the Q&A was focused around Belgium not being ‘The Promised Land’ of chocolate (anymore), the scary variety of substances in chocolate bars, en tips to keep and store chocolate.

Chocolate and its plethora of surrounding topics always make a great conversation starter, so pretty soon we had a good vibe, getting us open to enter the tasting part. After 4 bars only, people were amazed already by my broad offering and the variety in tasting sensations, even ‘less appreciated aroma’s’ were adding to overall discovery experience.
Noteworthy where also organic Pacari, the recent Akesson’s and absolutely the handcrafted Amano Jembrana, which I exclusively got from the USA directly from founder Art Pollard, with a big help from Martin at SeventyPercent as well in London.
These treasures aside I also showed a bloomed bar of Willie’s (don’t know how that happened actually), and wowed them with the Michel Cluizel ‘Grand Lait 45% milk bar’ (‘Is this milk chocolate?!’), shared unroasted and roasted cacao beans I received from Pralus, and put the cherry on the cake with the Pralus 100% as the usual über chocolate experience!