Three Months of Kekao, Part 1
Kekao is a craft chocolate monthly subscription box service, of which I purchased three months.
Month 1 (May 2021)
Akesson's Single Plantation Chocolate Brazil 75% Forastero Cocoa
Dark deep smell. Night time on a canal. Takes some time to get started with the melting. Sharp when it does. Then more mellow, but the sharp hangs around. Bitter. I keep seeing a suave French boy of about 16 walking down a canal at night. Trying to woo a girl, though perhaps he hasn't found her yet. Quite full of himself, bold and young and sauntering. He wears a suit trying to look older than he is. He knows a lot about who he wants to be, but he's not comfortable with himself yet. He wants the admiration of those around him, and he wants to have a good time tonight.
Blanxart Organic Dark Chocolate 77% Criollo de Alto Piura Peru
Sweet smell. Playful sunshine smell. Little chalky and waxy starting out. Kinda grainy. Florid. Some cool flowers going on under there. Like flowers in an old trunk left in a cellar covered in dust and dry cobwebs. Lays from a luau stored in an old black leather trunk that somehow stayed fresh all these years.
Manoa Ali'i Kula Lavender 60%
Smelling it, I said "whoa" aloud several times. Sweet sweet lavender. Purple lavender fields cake. Yoga eye pillows. Bubble bath in the sunshine. Wearing a sun hat with a ribbon taking a bubble bath in a sunny forest clearing with bees collecting clover honey and buzzing all around.
Artisan du Chocolat London Milk Chocolate 41% Salted Honeycomb
Sweet bees wax smell on a grandmother's shelf. Grandma's candy in a sunny living room. Whaaaaat is this texture??? Gritty crunchy brittle. The trinkets and knickknacks she keeps in dusty mirrored display cabinets. Ah, salt also I think. Too sweet like hard candy. The book Black Beauty sitting beside porcelain dolls, collected for no purpose. It gives me a headache.
Reflections
I did *not* like the salted honeycomb milk chocolate. It made me almost angry with its vapid sweetness and broken texture. The lavender one was pretty fun; pleasant relaxing interesting entertainment. An excellent time out for the middle of the day. The Blanxart is a good chocolate for Halloween; you have to be patient with the old forgotten dryness to hear the ghost beneath it, but there definitely is a ghost, and it has some things to say.
Akesson's kicked everybody's butt in this round. Ali'i Kula lavender is great at what it does, but it's utilitarian, like Dove chocolate or genre fiction. Akesson's has a lot more depth. It's the only one of these playing the same game as Francois Pralus and holding its own. It's really got a personality worth getting to know. I'd use it in the early stages of a biography, or a character story about coming of age in the city.
First impression of this Kekao subscription box thing: it's really all over the place. I enjoy the suspense of having no idea what I'm gonna get, but I'd probably enjoy a clearly coherent curation approach more. I've got two more of these on the way.
