J. Herbin Cacao du Bresil

The hue of this ink is unlike anything else in my (kinda huge) collection. It's a gray-brown ink that tends to shade from one to the other as you write. Here are a few examples.

 You can see the brown and grey bits in the smear above and in the text below. It's a neat trick, and not something I've seen in an ink before.

 I was curious about what might be making up this color, so I did a little bit of chromatography on it. This isn't terribly scientific, but it does show the different parts of the ink, and it's fun to do, occasionally.

The qualities of this ink are pretty solid, too. The flow is great, there aren't any bad habits like bleed/feathering or spreading. I've used it on all sorts of papers, and it always works well.

It's dark enough to be formal-ish, but no one is going to think that you're using a boring ballpoint when you use Cacao du Bresil.

This is one of my favorite inks. I've only tried a few J. Herbin inks, and I've rarely been disappointed. I'm not 100% sure that I would have bought this one for myself, but my wife got me a bunch of samples for xmas, and this was one of them. I tried it first because I'd never heard of it, and it has been in that pen ever since. I'll certainly be getting a bottle of this stuff at the next pen show.

I have no idea how to say the name of this ink. I assume that there's a French pronunciation for these words, but I don't know it. Anyway, you'll get to hear me butcher it in the video below.