Divine Chocolate Bars

Divine chocolates are made from cocoa beans raised in Ghana, and the company has a good story which I won't re-tell here but encourage you to research through a purchase or their website. The chocolate is highly worth it and there are many flavors to choose from, not to mention the products are fair-trade certified and come in beautiful packaging! The package design has significance to the culture from which the cocoa beans stem, and there is a feature on the website that I enjoyed, which lets you roll over all the symbols to discover their meanings. I love chocolate (and other products) that go beyond what they are and incorporate creativity. I also appreciate the fact that they do what they can to make honest products that somehow benefit both the producers and the consumers.

The first one I tried was the 70% Dark Chocolate, which is both vegetarian and vegan. Some dark chocolates contain traces of milk products, but this one does not, and for those unfamiliar with non-milk dark chocolate it doesn't taste strange at all! There are other natural ingredients that make it what it is, and the lack of milk just makes the flavor stronger and deeper. I guess what I'm trying to say is don't let the words vegetarian and vegan make you think that it's something funky-- in fact, it's pretty much a simple, classic dark chocolate.

The 70% dark bar has a pleasantly smooth, silky texture which is exactly what I want in a chocolate bar. It melts in your mouth if you let it, and is fine to be chewed if you're a chewer. (Personally, I'm a chewer when I'm not busy analyzing the flavor. I can't fight the urge!) The flavor has a strong punch that's very dark, but if you let it melt it has moments of perfect sweetness. With dark chocolate it's all a balancing act, with sweetness on the lighter end of the scale. The strong flavor is great, but it's really enhanced by those surprising moments of sweet. The aftertaste is also pretty strong for a few seconds, and tastes something akin to a coffee flavor. At first I didn't like the aftertaste; that part took some figuring out and getting used to. In the end I decided it's not an unhappy flavor at all, just strong.

The Hazelnut Milk Chocolate shared the same smooth-melting texture but was also a slight bit softer, as most milk chocolates are. It does contain cream so it was still vegetarian (depending on your level of vegetarianism) but not vegan.

It was sweet, but not too sweet, and the hazelnuts added a nice soft crunch to the texture. The hazelnuts didn't add lots of flavor that I noticed, but I liked that they were in there. In fact, I think it could've used a little more hazelnut flavor overall.

Really the reason I purchased this bar was because I saw the words "hazelnut" and "chocolate" paired together and that equated to "Nutella" in my brain. It was nothing close to Nutella in flavor (maybe a much much more lightly flavored cousin if there is a comparison) but I have to say I wasn't awfully disappointed. I very much enjoyed it even though I'm not a huge fan of milk chocolate.

Overall, I enjoyed both flavors I tried and I would definitely recommend them to others! If you'll excuse cheesiness for a moment, I'll say that Divine really IS divine.