Vere Raspberry + Lemon

Here’s the second of my two Vere bars (remember, they were buy one get one free), Vere Raspberry + Lemon.

Like its Mint + Nibs counterpart, the Raspberry + Lemon is an organic, single origin bar. It takes the cacao content up a notch, to 75%, and I found that difference hugely apparent. The snap of this bar is super hard – it almost hurt my teeth. It was so snappy as to be unpleasant to bite into.

The scent was dark and chalky with just a hint of citrus sourness. Upon tasting, if you survived biting into it, you’d find a dry melt and a bar that tasted of powdered dark cocoa with a lightly sweet and tart fruity finish. I could taste the raspberry and lemon, though I’m not sure that I would’ve been able to identify the specific fruits in a blind tasting.

While the Mint + Nibs bar was studded with bits of cacao nibs, the Raspberry + Lemon bar was full of raspberry seeds. That I greatly appreciated, which is surprising, considering my profound distaste for seedy raspberry candies. It may have been my imagination, but I felt as though I got a bonus burst of sweet raspberry flavor from grinding up those seeds.

All in all, the fruit flavor was decent, but the chocolate was lacking. And the bar was way too hard to eat. This bar would greatly benefit from a reformulation to make it softer. An O.