Strong and pungent
Amount of grounds:
2 tablespoons per 10 oz of water
Brewing time:
8.5 minutes
Additions:
Vanilla almond milk tones down the flavor and brings out the toastiness, but it's still quite pungent.
Reusing grounds:
It tones down the flavor a bit, but the pungency is still there. Using almond milk at the same time doesn't seem to change it.
Using grounds in food:
Not recommended. Contains husk.
General Thoughts:
General feeling about the roast
In spite of my previous misgivings with Ancillary Darkness, decided to give it one last try since I only had one serving left.
Ancillary Darkness is very bitter compared to Anakin, and very pungent. Besides those two things, I'm not picking out much else in the flavor. Vanilla almond milk helps it a lot, bringing out a tiny bit more of a toasted flavor, but the pungency still makes it hard to drink. I'm glad that it's finally done.
Anakin is a little more chocolatey with a good roasted flavor. I actually can drink it black unlike what I previously thought. As before, the almond milk brings out a bit more of the toasted flavor, although I think I'm finding that this newer batch has a little less of the "marshmallow" flavor to it. It's not that it truly had marshmallow flavor, but the toasted flavor felt like it was in the same family. But it's still good and it absolutely beats Ancillary Darkness.
Note: This is technically a rematch. I did this same pairing yesterday, but it turned out I had everything mixed up in multiple ways! I had the brews switched from what I thought they were, and when I tried to the rebrewing, I crossed the new grounds with the old ones, making everything taste the same. No wonder I was so confused.
While waiting for them to cool, I took a few whiffs of each, and I noticed that Shadow's Silhouette does have that "brownies in the oven" smell. Ancillary Darkness smelled more like coffee, and was dark and bitter. The Shadow's Silhouette flavor was milder and more chocolatey, but Ancillary Darkness had a strong pungency to it that was really hard to drink black. It grew on me a little bit as I kept going, but it was hard at first, and I'm not sure if it's something I could do often. The Shadow's Silhouette, though, isn't too bad to drink black.
After adding just a tiny little bit of vanilla almond milk, Shadow's Silhouette came out even more chocolatey. I'm considering running it against Crio Bru Ecuador French to see which is more chocolatey. Also, I may also keep some to compare against Anakin when I get more of that. (which should be soon-ish. Sam is sending me a gift card for Chocolate Alchemy!)
Even with adding vanilla almond milk to Ancillary Darkness, it still tastes very roasted. It loses a lot of the bitter and pungency, and is much more drinkable, but it's not the "toasted marshmallow" of Anakin.
I decided to go ahead and also try rebrewing the same grounds and add an extra tablespoon of new grounds to each. Ancillary Darkness seemed to stick really pretty close to the original, but Shadow's Silhouette came out fairly weak, so I wouldn't rebrew that one in the future.
Adding almond milk with the rebrewed Ancillary Darkness seemed to pretty much perform as above, coming out with the roasty flavor. It maybe leans just slightly more towards the toasted marshmallow flavor of Anakin, but no much, as it's still way more roasty than marshmallowy, but it's decent.
As for the Shadow's Silhouette, adding almond milk to the already weaker brew just causes the flavor to get even more washed out and muddy. It's barely "weak hot chocolate" at this point.
One last little note on the Ancillary Darkness that I almost hate to mention, but I've noticed that both for my mixed up first round and this round, afterwards, I felt like I was burping it up for a number of hours after, and it was not a nice chocolatey flavor. It was the pungency that came through, but only that, and it almost went in the direction of garlic, onion or even slightly fishy. Yuck. Maybe it was because I had 2 cups of it and one wouldn't affect me as much, but I'm not sure that I'll be able to drink that one again.
When spooning the grounds into the french presses, I noticed that Ancillary Darkness wass slightly darker than Big O, and smelled a bit more roasty. In a big contrast, The Big O almost smelled like a slice of honey wheat bread. Once I brewed them and they were cooling, that didn't really change.
Ancillary Darkness was very bitter and roasted tasting. The Big O is very strong and almost sour. It has a strong bread-like flavor, almost coming across as slightly fermented. It's almost like beer minus the zip of alcohol. Drinking them black, I'm not a fan of either one.
Even after adding almond milk, I'm still kind of "meh" about both. The bready scent of Big O is really off-putting to me, and I had a hard time finishing it. For Ancillary Darkness, it's mostly just the roast flavor coming through. It's not the straight up campfire charcoal of Choffy's Volta French roast. It's different, but I can't pin down how right now. Neither The Big O or Ancillary Darkness gives me any sort of "chocolate" impression.
Speaking of the Volta French roast, I haven't been this disappointed in my brewing cocoa experience since I first brewed that one. That makes me really sad because I was really hoping I'd love all the Chocolate Alchemy stuff considering how much I wound up loving Anakin. I may have to do a side-by-side comparison with each of these two against Volta French just to see which one wins the title of "Least Favorite of All". :-(
I guess if I had to pick one I dislike the least, it would be Ancillary Darkness.