Tasting flight builder
Set up a side-by-side tasting of two to eight chocolates, blind if you like, and compare them line by line.
What this cannot tell you
- It cannot make one person blind to a list they typed themselves. Tasting alone, someone else has to plate the samples, or the cups have to be coded underneath and shuffled.
- It does not rank and does not pick a winner. A difference between two samples is not a preference, and there is no overall score.
- One person's scores on one occasion are a rough measurement. A one-point difference is reported as about the same, because the same taster will give the same chocolate scores a point apart on different days.
- The suggestion to keep a flight to five or fewer is this site's rule of thumb about tiring the palate, not a measured limit.
- A code hides the name, not the chocolate. Colour, shape, a moulded logo and thickness all give samples away unless the pieces are broken small and look alike.
- Nothing is saved. Reloading the page discards the flight, the key and the scores.
Why codes, and why a shuffled order
A taster who can see the wrapper has already been told what to expect by the maker, the percentage and the price. A code with no meaning removes that. The order is shuffled because position can matter too: the first sample meets a fresh palate and the last one does not, and if the order is always the same, whatever that does always falls on the same chocolate. Codes that look like ranks or grades, such as 100, 111 or 123, are never issued.
This site holds its own planned kitchen tests to the same rule; see the test kitchen.
Getting more out of a flight
- Keep pieces the same size. How strong bitterness, acidity and astringency seem depends on how much is in the mouth, as the tasting vocabulary explains.
- Decide which sense a word belongs to before writing it down. Drying is not bitterness, and a vinegar smell is not fruit.
- To check yourself, enter one chocolate twice under two names. If your two sets of scores differ by a point, that is how much a point is worth.
- For one chocolate in depth, with faults traced to their causes, use the tasting scorecard. For the method, see how to taste chocolate.