A gourmet, organic bar, this. These long, thin bars come in a few different flavours, though green tea was the only one in stock, so now I get to see a Western view of how Belgian chocolate and green tea should go.

There’s a bit of blurb, and here it is: “The Charlemagne Belgian chocolates are made in an ancient renovated farmhouse (the birthplace, twelve centuries ago, of the Emperor Charlemagne), using a patented process which allows delicious and unexpected natural oriental flavours to be subtly infused into the organic chocolate.”

Usual rubbish, methinks, but they call it gourmet, as well as calling themselves “chocolatiers”, suggesting some sort of class involved somewhere. The box looks…odd, it’s extremely thin and long, but it looks nice, and comes in some good quality cardboard.

The bar then comes in a plastic wrapper which isn’t as impressive, but anyway as you can see, the bar is also very, very dark. It took a lot of work to try and take that picture and get the bar to have any complexion at all. With 74% cocoa solids this is to be expected though, and when smelling the bar, it just smells of dark chocolate, not a hint of green tea.

And sadly, the same goes for the taste. I know there’s green tea somewhere, I can almost taste it, sometimes as it melts it’s almost there, but really, it’s just dark chocolate with an ever so slightly modified taste. Now it’s nice, don’t get me wrong, but I paid for a chocolate and green tea bar, and that’s what they marketed this as, and that’s just not what it is.

Overall, a disappointment. I always cringe when a company has to big themselves up, as I always fear they’re setting themselves up for a fall, and Charlemagne have done that here. Don’t get me wrong, the bar was nice, the chocolate was good quality, and I liked it, but it’s not green tea at all, and that greatly disappoints me.

I can’t recommend this, perhaps it takes a more refined palette, but I don’t want to give them an excuse, try the other flavours if you can and let me know how they are.