Over the past two or three years, I have tasted approximately 250 high-quality dark chocolates from a wide variety of sources and makers. Logan and I do it as a sort of phenomenological study, mostly for fun but also a little bit for noticing/naturalism practice, really sinking into the experience and taking extensive notes.
I started distilling lists of favorites, and have put on two (of a planned three) “Ultimate tastings” in Berkeley, where I bring a curated preplanned menu of thirteen outstanding top-tier chocolates, and lead a group of ~20 people through it, first introducing the basics of “how to ‘do a tasting’” and then doing taste-discuss, taste-discuss.
Logan’s description of the distinction between tasting and snacking chocolates:
I break chocolates into two categories: “snacking chocolates” and “art chocolates”.
The difference between a snacking chocolate and an art chocolate is how additional attention is rewarded.
Art chocolates reward additional attention with more complex experience. If you’re not offering a lot of attention, you might experience an art chocolate as sweet, bitter, and pleasant. But if you close your eyes, take your time, and listen with care and openness, all sorts of thoughts and imagined experiences will flood in, building on each other and unfolding over time. When I pay careful attention to an art chocolate and describe the experience, I have to include many details before I feel satisfied with my description, and I have to listen for a long time before I feel I’ve heard everything it has to say.
Snacking chocolates reward additional attention differently: with immersion in the original experience. If I got “warm lazy sunshine” in the first fifteen seconds, that’s exactly what I’ll get for the next two minutes. If I pay careful attention, nothing will unfold or develop. I’ll sink more deeply into the feeling of “warm lazy sunshine” the whole time.
(And if I got “waxy pavement headache”, well, I shouldn’t wait around hoping for it to change.)
So which kind is better? That depends on what you want to do with it.
Most mass-produced chocolate—like Dove, Divine, or Tony’s—is snacking chocolate. It’s often delicious and sometimes complex, but it rarely goes anywhere over time.
It’s basically food. It talks in short sentences made of small words to the parts of you that track your security in the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy—the parts that love extra soft beds, jumping into water, and getting a hug. What you’re supposed to do with snacking chocolate is eat it. When I’m deciding how “good” a snacking chocolate is, I mostly ask myself how safe and happy I feel while immersed in my experience of eating it.
Art chocolate is basically art. It’s also food, but it’s food in the same way that a symphony is sound.
It’s designed to cause particular emotional experiences. And like any other kind of art, it’s not always all that enjoyable, especially in the first few seconds. Several of the most rewarding art chocolates I’ve tried would be boring and unpleasant compared to Dove if I snacked on them absentmindedly. And some of the interesting, complex experiences they offer are not experiences I like having—I once listened carefully to an art chocolate that I eventually described as, “Walking to class through the snow at 8AM with a bad hangover.”
When I’m deciding how “good” an art chocolate is, I mostly ask myself whether the artist took me on a worthwhile ride. So art chocolate is the way to go only if you want to make your phenomenology a canvas for someone else’s ideas.
Fascinating! And do you document the results of these tastings? Reviews, lists of tasted chocolates, etc.? (Something like Gwern’s tea reviews come to mind as a model…)
Over the past two or three years, I have tasted approximately 250 high-quality dark chocolates from a wide variety of sources and makers. Logan and I do it as a sort of phenomenological study, mostly for fun but also a little bit for noticing/naturalism practice, really sinking into the experience and taking extensive notes.
I started distilling lists of favorites, and have put on two (of a planned three) “Ultimate tastings” in Berkeley, where I bring a curated preplanned menu of thirteen outstanding top-tier chocolates, and lead a group of ~20 people through it, first introducing the basics of “how to ‘do a tasting’” and then doing taste-discuss, taste-discuss.
Logan’s guide to chocolate tasting
Logan’s description of the distinction between tasting and snacking chocolates:
Fascinating! And do you document the results of these tastings? Reviews, lists of tasted chocolates, etc.? (Something like Gwern’s tea reviews come to mind as a model…)
I’ve got lots and lots of notes but besides a few things randomly shared on FB have not done much in the way of formal organization.
Logan’s stuff (findable on the site already linked) looks a lot like Gwern’s.
Hmm, I did see the commentary on the linked site, yes. I confess that I had been hoping for something somewhat less… whimsical in approach.
But I certainly understand that organizing data like this for useful presentation isn’t a trivial task.