Guinness Luxury Milk Chocolate Caramel Bar (Selfridges) [By @SpectreUK]

Happy St Patrick's Day!

Now as a rule I like anything to do with beer. You would plainly see that from looking at my rather stout profile on meeting me. I love a good pint of stout also. I’ve tried plenty of beers in my time and plenty of stouts, and I’ve even tried beer flavoured crisps and Guinness flavoured hot pot and crisps. This 90g milk chocolate bar with a caramel and Guinness flavoured centre was made by Lir, Ireland’s award winning chocolatiers. On the smart cardboard packaging this chocolate bar was described as having; “roasted and creamy notes of Guinness mixed with Lir’s milk chocolate”, reading further I was expecting this to be a bitter sweet chocolate sensation with a runny caramel flavoured with Guinness and wrapped in an exquisite milk chocolate shell. The chocolate bar’s ingredients contained milk, soya, barley and gluten, and also possibility traces of nuts from the factory, and included sugar, cocoa butter, glucose syrup, dried whole milk, cocoa mass, butter, Guinness Beer (2%), non fat milk solids, milk fat, neutral spirit, soya lecithin, sea salt. Per 100g this bar was 510 calories, with 29.2g of fat and 7.1g of sugar.

The chocolate bar contained less than 1% volume in alcohol, but still stated on the box that the bar was intended to be bought and enjoyed by people of legal purchase age for booze. In my mind this left the possibility of woman who like Guinness. I know that sounds very sexist, and as a rule, I try my level best not to be, but in my experience, guys generally don’t go crazy for luxury chocolate (give me mostly any over the counter chocolate bar any day) and woman don’t go crazy for stout! Over a few years as a barman in younger times I was never asked for a stout by a woman, and rarely enough by men (who generally asked for the cheapest lager).

There was a strong smell of milk chocolate and a hint of malted barley and caramel on opening the cardboard box and unwrapping the foil around the bar. The milk chocolate and runny dark caramel had an initial sugary syrup sweetness that merged with a slight bitter roasted malt flavour. This bittersweet taste was very moreish and luxurious tasting at first. Unfortunately the sugary sweetness became overpowering after less than half the bar and the lovely initial milk chocolate taste was completely overshadowed by the sweetness with its bitter malted bite. There was a creamy malted sugar sweet aftertaste that by the end of the bar made me want to wash my mouth out. Maybe the bar is just too sweet to eat in one go, but I managed it. I’ve seen woman in the office and at home sometimes leave chocolate bars lying around half eaten, so maybe this bar would suite them more than the general guy type who chomps it down in the least amount of mouthfuls as possible and consequences be damned for the size of their tummies and the super sweet overload. Having said that, I really don’t think I’ll be chomping one of these bars down again in a hurry!

By Spectre