I bought a trio of booze-filled Lindt bars two summers ago in Cambridge, England. Whisky is pictured below; the other two were Irish Coffee and Cointreau. While I tasted the chocolates soon after I bought them, it took me until now to get around to writing about them.
Why the wait? Because every single one of the three bars that I had just shelled out quite a bit of dough for turned out to be all dried up when I opened them! I sent Lindt an email to complain, and while I waited for the response that never came, I forgot about them.
When I opened them, the chocolates appeared to be pristine. They looked like a pill-pack of chocolate, and each Lindt-stamped capsule looked unblemished and, I imagined, full of the promised “liquid filling.”
This was the summer of 2008, and the bars were marked as being good until April and May 2009. But when I chomped into the capsules, the insides were all dried up and crystallized. Boo.
I’m not sure if they were supposed to be like that, or if the posh (and pricey!) shop that I bought them from stored them incorrectly, or if Lindt was overly optimistic with their sell-by dates, but I was sorely disappointed. They promised liquid fillings. Of booze!
Maybe now’s a good time to add the aside that I was 20 this summer and earnestly learning about the cultural differences between the U.S. and the U.K. No open container laws; cheap and plentiful beers, ales, and ciders; and I never once got carded.
Anyway, the decidedly non-liquid fillings had lost their flavor along with their moisture. Cointreau was maybe tinged with orange, and Whisky had a nearly imperceptible alcoholic finish, but they otherwise just tasted like milk chocolate that was maybe a tad sweeter than usual.
In the state that I got these, they deserve a —. And Lindt gets the same for their (lack of) customer service. As far as I know, they’re not available in the U.S., but they seem to still be sold in the U.K., and with a few more flavors on offer.
What a disappointment! Lindt is usually such high and consistent quality.
So I get to see this again.
I’ve had the same unpleasant experience with three Villars Larmes boozy bars (cherry liqueur, williams pear & wild plum liqueur)and, more recently, with some Virginias cherry liqueur chocolates.
I think it’s something that has to do more with how they are stored during the summer than with the actual quality of the chocolates.
Besides those three Larmes bars, I’ve only tried two other Villars bars. One of them was from one of their cheaper ranges (they don’t even have those listed on their website) and it was ok, though it had nothing impressive… it was nothing that I’d want to try again. The other one was their milk chocolate bar, which was really nice and creamy.
But Virginias and Lindt… I’ve tried a lot of products from them and I know they have really nice stuff… some of their products are something to die for.