Episode 1 - Tasting Notes

Episode Highlights

  • (0:40) Brian and Sunita discuss chocolate tasting notes and compare it with coffee tasting notes. 

  • (3:22) Can we move beyond using words like “chocolate” or “cocoa” when tasting chocolate?

  • (9:40) Different ways to describe the taste of chocolate: flavor wheels, elevators, and taste memories.

  • (15:15) Do tasting notes set tasters up for dissatisfaction or failure?  How do makers use certain words to gild the lily by making flavor defects sound appealing?

  • (26:45) How can fermentation affect flavor?  

  • (28:25) How do flavor defects affect supply chain relationships?

  • (34:27) How does the price of cacao affect the quality of chocolate?

Favorite Quotations

  • Sunita: “To me, fudgy brownie means the satisfying base lower notes of a chocolate which is traditionally what all chocolate has been because there hasn’t been any more than that in the past.”

  • Brian: “I see layers of flavor and where they sit as if its an elevator that I’m looking at from a dissection and can see what’s at different levels.”

  • Sunita: “They’ll talk about a particular emotional experience [when tasting chocolate,] and I love that, and I feel like if I give you a card and tell you this is how you should talk about chocolate, I lose that opportunity to hear how they experience it.”

  • Sunita: “I feel that we need, if we want a long term healthy ecosystem, we need to have a good connection between price and quality up and down the supply chain to send the signal across the board that this equals quality and this will fetch a premium price.”

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Brian Beyke