Galapagos Harvest 2019 by To’ak (70%)

It’s finally cool enough to order chocolate again, rather than relying on local grocery stores! Hooray! I’m kicking off this chocolate season with To’ak’s first bar that isn’t from their usual Ecuadorian plantations, and one of the first chocolate bars to come from beans grown in the Galapagos islands.

Tasting Notes

Smells bitter, sharp, sweet, dark, chocolatey, coffee, some kind of fruit like maybe orange peel. Melts fast, though that may be in part because it’s still a little warm here. Flavor is unusual. Immediately: shrap, a little florid, smooth. Butterscotch. Reminds me of bourbon. Texture is more like Omnom than anything else I've tried; the super smooth chewiness is distinctive. Something about this is incredibly silky. Like bathing in cream. It melts away so fast. It's like silk flowers in the sun. Warm, like fall baking spices. Nutmeg cinnamon cloves allspice ginger. It hangs back. There's very little that is forward here. Nothing aggressive at all. It's all quite balanced and in the back of my mouth, in the back of my attention. I feel like I'd need to eat a lot of it to hear it all the way. It makes me feel... well honestly a little anxious about how quickly it goes away. But also it makes me feel like twirling, and having tea and cookies on the deck. It reminds me of the wings of a butterfly at rest.

Discussion

It's an excellent chocolate. Easily one of the very best I’ve tried. It doesn’t resonate super strongly with my own personality, though, so it doesn’t quite make my list of favorites despite its extraordinary quality.

But it's no Rain Harvest 2018. I'm finding less depth and complexity here, by comparison. If 2018 is a 5/5, this is a 4.5. If you'd told me this was made by OmNom, I'd be excited that they'd upped their game an entire tier, but I wouldn't doubt you.

I wonder whether this is nacional like their Ecuador plantations, or if it's something else. My weak guess (before investigating) is that this was made with trinitario beans.

According to this interview with Pati Stucki, the owner of one of the To’ak partnered chocolate plantations in Santa Cruz, they're not allowed to bring in new plants, and can only use the cacao trees that are growing locally. Which at the very least means that the beans used for this bar are probably not descended from the Piedra de Plata trees To'ak usually uses. But obviously another huge difference is the volcanic soil.

According to this article about the Galapagos Safari Camp cacao plantation, To'ak makes their Galapagos bar from the Safari Camp plantation as well as Pati's, and in fact Pati contributed beans to Safari Camp. They claim that 88% of the DNA from their first tree is nacional. Interesting.

My current guess is that most of the difference between the 2018 Rain Harvest and the Galapagos bar is due to the soil difference. I definitely need to try the other To'ak Rain Harvests to learn about the range of the Piedra de Plata nacional cacao over time.