A long while ago, after I had finished Fifty Weeks, Fifty Curries and was thinking about what to do next when I found an article on the internet entitled How the Mast Brothers fooled the world into paying $10 a bar for crappy hipster chocolate. It's pretty much as the article states, and when searching for the Mast Brothers, it's still near the top of the Google search results. Chocolate, I thought. That led to me to Raaka and to the idea of doing Darker than Black as a series to replace Fifty Weeks, Fifty Curries, and I always had in mind that I would finish with a Mast Brothers bar. And now, the time has come.

The fourth result, just below that article I linked, is another article entitled Chocolate-Making Mast Brothers Are Ready For Sweet Redemption, so maybe this will turn out better than the internet has led to me believe. Who would have thought that something could have been published in the internet, been blasted all around the world, and turn out to be not entirely correct?

We don't need to think long about the answer to that.


Well. It turns out that this is good chocolate.

It's oddly heavy. I'm not sure I can think of another way to describe it, but there's an extremely dark undercurrent to the taste that caught me by surprise during my first bite, and initially I found it pretty unpleasant. But after that first moment of shock it grew on me, which I should have expected. Often chocolate requires more than one bite for the flavors to really come to the fore, and I'm always willing to give chocolate as many bites as there are available.

The texture was good too. It had some of feel of stone-ground chocolate without the actual grittiness. I really like stone-ground chocolate, so it makes me wonder what they did to get that feel here? This is pretty good chocolate, and I would love to buy more. Whether it's remelted industrial chocolate or not, the taste makes it worth it.


schoolpsychnerd's Opinion

I was prepared to be somewhat disdainful of the hipster chocolate. And...I mean I was wrong! It was good! It was worth the money! I liked the texture, it had some of the strength of stone ground chocolate with a smoothness and sheen. I loved the astringency which gave way to sweetness. It was a very satisfying bar and I am now going to grow a giant beard and wear flannel and rolled leg skinny jeans.

And with that transformation, schoolpsychnerd moves away from chocolate. Anything that I know enough about to buy is obvious too mainstream for her to eat, and so Darker than Black comes to an end. Thank you for coming on this chocolate journey, and I hope you've found some chocolates that you want to eat!