Endangered Species Natural Dark Chocolate with 88% cocoa

About: A chocolate that tries to appeal to pull your heartstrings with pictures (and a brand name) of endangered species should set off warnings. It's fair trade, it's gluten free (!), it's non GMO, and it's certified vegan. I suspect it's even not tested on live animals, wow! Since 10% of the proceeds are donated to "non-profit partners that protect and support wildlife" (a somewhat vague phrase, to my mind, but you can't put a legal contract on a chocolate wrapper), it's an appeal to "do good, never mind if it tastes good."

Well, there is a fairly broad set of chocolate bars behind this brand, and even a chocolate spread. The online blog is a strange mixture of chocolate recipes intermingled with "Tips for a healthy ocean" or success stories resulting from their donation. Want to see a happy African child while indulging in dark chocolatey hedonism? You've found a home.

This is not a bean-to-bar chocolate. It's made from liquor and perhaps you can taste that. I'm not sure I can, but I can tell that while this bar is dark dark dark and doesn't suffer suffer suffer too much from the commonplace over roasting or over fermentation, it's not going to take any part of my heart or much of  my stomach.


Flavor:  It's 88% and so you expect some bitterness. But you could hope for a more fruity flavor and slightly less burned flavor. For that - the carbon overtones - I give it a -1. 

Texture: Quite nice for 88%, where many bars are ever so brittle. This bar is smooth and relatively creamy.

My rating: Nice and dark, and can satisfy a craving for something very dark. But the slightly burned flavor left me slightly disappointed, so I ended up at 4.

Rating Value	Meaning
1	Really bad chocolate. There's something just really really wrong here in almost every imaginable respect.
2	A bar with this rating has at least two drawbacks.
3	A bar where something is starting to get seriously wrong.... for example, really weak flavor with an otherwise acceptable texture.
4	This bar is below average, but just slightly. Mostly it's not worth eating again. Something isn't quite up to par, for example a poor texture but fine flavor.
5	This is an average good bar that's worth eating. There's nothing really wrong with it, but also nothing particularly spectacular. Or, perhaps it has a good characteristic that's evenly counter-weighted by something weak.
6	A solidly good bar with one characteristic that's above par, for example a great texture.
7	An solidly good chocolate that has two above par characteristics, but nothing mind-blowing. Good, above average flavor, but nothing to die for.
8	An excellent bar with no weaknesses and at least one characteristic that's super.
9	An awesome bar to die for with amazing texture and flavor.
10	You have been touched by God.

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