Chalky

A gritty, sandy texture rather than a flavour. Under-refining, and the most common flaw in small-batch chocolate.

Chalkiness is a texture fault, included in the flavour register because that is where readers describe it. It means solid particles above the roughly 25 microns at which the tongue starts detecting grain.

It is the single most common flaw in small-batch chocolate, because adequate refining takes considerably longer than it appears to and the equipment is expensive. There is no flavour compensation for it: a coarse refine is a coarse refine whatever the beans were.

Descriptors used: gritty, sandy, grainy, chalky, coarse
Desirable?: A fault in a modern bar and a characteristic in traditional stone-ground preparations.

Where it comes from

The route by which this note arrives in the chocolate.

From an added ingredient
Recorded
Some traditional products are deliberately coarse — Mexican tablea and stone-ground drinking chocolate are characteristically grainy.
How to tell: If the product is a traditional stone-ground one, the grain is the product rather than a fault.
Source: ChocolateHQ

When it is a fault

Under-refining — particle size left above the perception threshold, roughly 25 to 30 microns.

How to tell: Felt on the tongue rather than tasted. Distinguishable from bloom by being present from the first bite rather than developing over time.

Recorded Source: Royal Society of Chemistry

Covered in

Particle size and smoothnessThe sensory descriptor most often used for the fault.
Why chocolate is grainyThe sensory descriptor, and how it is used in tasting notes.

Developed during

RefiningThis stage is where the note is created, amplified or destroyed. A gritty, sandy texture rather than a flavour. Under-refining, and the most common flaw in small-batch chocolate.

Sources

ChocolateHQ editorial synthesis — ChocolateHQ(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)
The Science of Chocolate — Royal Society of Chemistry(citation identity confirmed; passage not re-read)