Raising the bar: Chocolate
Great Taste coordinators’ workshop 2025 with Spencer Hyman, Cocoa Runners
Spencer started Cocoa Runners to encourage makers to really think about taste in their bars.
Learning about chocolate is about tasting as much as possible and really thinking about the elements that each bar brings, giving you a sense of what makes great chocolate and how to identify great chocolate when they come across your palate.
The best place to start with reading or reviewing what was learnt in this workshop is with Spencer’s presentation, which can be downloaded via the button below. Below that you’ll find some useful notes and context gathered by the Guild of Fine Food team on the day.
Some chocolate culture facts & figures:
25% of Brits eat chocolate every day (not always great chocolate!)
Spencer asked the judges, what they thought we spend more on:
Q: Books or chocolate? Answer: Chocolate.
Q: Music or chocolate? Answer: Chocolate.
Q: Books & Music or chocolate? Answer: It’s about the same!
Activity to try at home
Spencer took us through some activities to distinguish taste from flavour. You can try this with a mint leaf:
Smell the mint leaf, breath in the minty aromas. Hold your nose and put the mint in your mouth. Chew and you’ll get some “cold” or tingling sensation, but none of the minty flavour. Let go of your nose and you’ll be hit with the mint taste. This is your olfactory process in action.
A useful analogy on taste vs flavour from music:
Piano’s have specific notes – if you press a particular key, a specific sound comes out and each is different. Think of this as taste.
Now think of a ’cello. A ’cello has four strings, which are specific notes, but you can use your figures to create the same note on different strings. This is flavour – more complex and a variety of ways of achieving it.
Explaining the chocolate tasting wave
Lots of products have tasting wheels – you can find them for beer, coffee, wine, cheese etc.
Spencer advocates using a wave for chocolate. Here’s why:
How to taste chocolate:
- Smell it (this is the start of the wave)
- Scrape a small amount of chocolate (you can use your nail) and rub it between your fingers until it starts to melt and disappear. Note: palm oil melts slowly against body heat.
- Snap the chocolate so you can audibly hear it. This is to see that it’s solid at room temperature (in your mouth, it will start to melt).
- Put the chocolate in your mouth and identify taste and texture (reaching the middle of the wave).
- After 5-10 seconds some aromas and volatiles will start to be released (the middle of the wave: taste and flavour). You also might consider things like acidity and astringency at this point.
- Finally, consider the aftertaste (the end of the wave).
Interesting fact: 3 out of 4 cocoa beans are made into cocoa butter.
Aroma volatiles are released by heat and tend to be a shared experience across different tasters. However, bonded volatiles that get released later vary significantly between people due to the different bacteria in our mouths.
Tasting chocolate involves taking the time to keep the chocolate in your mouth (think about how if you scoff chocolate really quickly you get barely any of the flavour and most people will do this for the sugar hit). The heat of your mouth releases the volatiles, i.e. the taste & flavour.
The challenge of identifying flavour (rather than taste)
Most people can identify taste (sweet, salty etc). Flavour is very hard to do without the vocabulary.
Think about walking into a busy room with lots of conversations going on. It’s hard to distinguish one particular conversation. Once you zone in on one, it’s easy to understand what’s going on. The same with trying to identify flavour – it’s easier to agree or disagree when someone mentions a specific flavour element as there’s something to focus in on.
To illustrate a point on the influence of heat:
Think about drinking chocolate – often chocolate bar makers don’t think about the different heat points that a drink will go through, from very hot to cooling down, all of which affect the flavour.
When thinking about assessing the flavour and qualities of chocolate, keep in mind “BLIC” = Balance, Length, Intensity, Complexity
Spencer Hyman, Cocoa Runners
Chocolate uses 1.5 – 2k litres of water. However, it really depends on what type of chocolate. (See the grid in Spencer’s presentation for more information).
Things to think about and consider if you do know the details of a chocolate
Beware of ingredients lists – some elements of chocolate production can be classified as “processing ingredients”. For example, emulsifiers are not always good news or bad news. e.g. Soy lecithin is generally not great news, but sunflower lecithin is often used for mouthfeel and is not necessarily bad.
Has PGPR (polyglycerol polyricinoleate) been used? Any other additives?
Where do the beans come from?
Where has it been made? Note: chocolate makers don’t necessarily have to say where it’s made (and where it’s made can be varyingly classified from where it was initially processed from where it ended up being a finished product.)
Some notes on typicity
Chocolate is, an industry, arguably “behind” some industries like wine or coffee in terms of genetic traceability.
Interestingly, culturally, Europeans are good at describing food as they are used to discussing it.
It’s incredibly hard to identify origins with chocolate, and that shouldn’t necessarily be the aim. e.g. Madagascar is one of the regions where there are some distinctive berry notes that can, but not always, make it easier to detect.
The typicity that we’re used to identifying in cheese or wine (e.g. by milk type or grape variety and region), doesn’t exist in chocolate.
A note on CCN51. In general, cocoa trees can’t be mass farmed, but CCN51 can be. There is certain chocolate-snobbery about CCN51 and environmentally it is challenging as a result. It can give a slightly metallic taste.
Some general rules of thumb
General rule of thumb (but not always): less roast = more fruit notes
To illustrate this, Spencer got us to try two bars from the same producer and location, and the only difference was the roast profile: a bold roast and a mild roast. Incredibly different flavour notes from each!
Percentage
Think about percentage as a guide, but not the be all and end all. 70% isn’t always a great chocolate, just as 60% or 65% isn’t bad. The thing to think about is the impact of the sugar. Sugar is the primary ingredient in most commercial chocolate. Even though the price has gone up recently, sugar is cheap. Sugar is used in chocolate to enhance and bring out the flavour, in the same way that salt does as seasoning. Sometimes a bit more sugar is needed, but it’s all about balance.
The recent value of chocolate
Chocolate has experienced an enormous price increase, especially over the last 12 months!
Beans have increased from $2,000 to $11,000 per ton (see more). However, craft chocolate will more easily be able to maintain its costs as the craft chocolate industry was already paying a lot more than $2,000 per tonne so will be able to absorb the general rise better.
Cocoa butter has gone from $6 per kilo to $60 per kilo, which is going to have a huge impact on white chocolate.
The background of this is that 70% of production comes from Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. “Big chocolate” have traditionally held about 6 months supply. A perfect storm of El Nino having a bad impact on harvest, fertiliser supply from Ukraine being cut down or halted, illegal gold farming in growing areas, swollen shoots disease, global warming, government elections and hedge fund investment has meant these stocks have been depleted.
Côte d’Ivoire used to get 80-90 inches of rain across 9 months, now it is experiencing 60-70 inches in 6 weeks. Dams are needed, but small farmers can’t afford it.
Some predict that this might mean that in the long term South America becomes a much larger player in cocoa growing.
A final note on craft chocolate’s image
Craft chocolate is difficult to market, there aren’t spokespeople in retail for it. If you compare craft chocolate to wine or coffee, it accounts for a very small % of the overall chocolate sales, whereas speciality coffee is a far bigger % and has wider consumer appeal. Think about baristas as the spokespeople for speciality coffee: they are customer-facing and give customers the opportunity to ask questions about the coffee, get recommendations etc. There isn’t really the equivalent for chocolate.