Extra Dark 82% with Maple + Lava Salt

Ingredients: Organic cacao, organic maple sugar, black lava salt

WHAT WE’RE TASTING IN THIS BAR:
S’mores · Cherry · Black pepper · Warm maple 

Extra Dark with Maple Sugar + Lava Salt is an 82% single-origin bar made with cacao from Öko Caribe in the Dominican Republic, sweetened with organic maple sugar, and finished with a dash of Icelandic black lava salt.

It’s legit dark chocolate, but remarkably approachable.

Öko Caribe is a central fermentary and drying operation that works with a small network of organic cacao growers throughout the lush Duarte Province. There, cacao trees grow beneath a generous shade canopy and alongside bananas, plantains, avocados, oranges, breadfruit, and other crops. The fresh cacao is carefully fermented in boxes, dried in the sun, and sorted by hand before it ever makes its way to us in Montana.

When we turn this cacao into chocolate, we do something a little unusual: we skip cane sugar entirely and sweeten the bar only with organic maple sugar from Pennsylvania — maple syrup cooked down until the water evaporates and crystalline sugar remains. It brings a subtler sweetness, but also its own flavor: warmer, darker, and more caramelized than cane sugar, and especially good with the deep, nutty, fruity character of the Öko cacao.

And we love the poetry of it, too: fruit from cacao trees in the tropics, sweetened with sap from northern forests. Trees + trees. 

Finally, we finish each bar with a dash of black lava salt from Saltverk in Iceland, made from Arctic seawater using geothermal energy in the Westfjords. The dramatic black flakes get their color from activated charcoal, and just a little salt is enough to soften the bitterness of an 82% bar and let the chocolateyness turn all the way up. 

And about that purple... check out the photos! Fresh cacao beans can have an incredible deep-purple interior before fermentation — yes, purple. It hardly sounds real until you see it yourself. For one of the darkest, most intensely chocolatey bars in our lineup, it felt like exactly the right inspiration for the box.

The finished bar somehow reminds us of a chocolate milkshake made with both chocolate ice cream and chocolate syrup.