How to Run a Cacao Tasting Flight (With a Vocabulary You Can Use)

Most people who drink cacao regularly could not describe what theirs tastes like beyond "rich" and "chocolatey". That is not a failure of palate. It is a failure of vocabulary — you cannot notice distinctions you have no words for, and nobody hands you the words.

A tasting flight fixes that faster than anything else, and it takes about forty minutes. Below is a working protocol, an actual descriptive lexicon you can read off a page while you drink, and the arithmetic for running it for a group.

What a flight is actually for

A flight is a controlled comparison. You are not trying to decide which cup is nicest — you are trying to isolate differences, which is a different task and needs different conditions.

The practical value is that it makes you a better buyer. Once you have tasted a pure cacao next to a spiced one and a sweetened one in the same sitting, at the same strength and temperature, you stop guessing about what you like. You also start noticing when a cacao is badly made, which is harder to see when you only ever drink one thing.

Five samples is the right number. Three is too few to establish a pattern. Beyond six, palate fatigue makes the later cups unreliable no matter how carefully you reset.

Hold everything constant except one thing

This is the rule that separates a tasting from a party. Every variable you do not control becomes noise you will mistake for signal.

Fix these:

• Ratio. 15 g cacao to 150 ml liquid. That is 1:10, and it is strong enough to show detail without being punishing across five cups.
• Liquid. Filtered water, not milk. Milk fat and casein round off edges and bind bitter compounds, which is lovely for drinking and terrible for comparison. Water shows you what is actually there.
• Temperature. 75°C at the pour. Use a thermometer. Guessing introduces a variable worth more than most of the differences you are trying to detect.
• Vessel. Same cup shape for all five, ideally something with a slightly narrowed rim to concentrate aroma. White or clear, so you can see colour.
• Preparation. Same method, same whisking time, same order of operations for every sample.

Then vary exactly one thing — the cacao. Everything else stays identical.

The order you pour in

Palate order matters more than people expect, because each cup contaminates the next.

Go from least to most assertive: pure and unsweetened first, then floral, then spiced, then sweetened last. Sweetness is the worst offender — once you have had a sweetened cup, an unsweetened one tastes harsh and thin by comparison, and you will misjudge it badly. Chile is nearly as bad, because capsaicin dissolves into the fat on your palate and stays there.

Using the six blends in the bundle, a sensible running order is: Pure, Rose Vanilla, Golden Milk, Mushroom Vitality, Mayan Spice, Maple Sweetened.

Between samples: a mouthful of room-temperature water, one plain water cracker or a thin slice of apple, and sixty to ninety seconds of waiting. The wait is the part people skip and it is the part that matters most — cocoa butter takes close to a minute to clear off the palate.

A vocabulary you can actually use

Print this or keep it open. The point is not to sound expert. The point is that having the word available is what lets you notice the thing.

Cacao core: cocoa, dark chocolate, cocoa nib, brownie.

Fresh fruit — citrus (orange peel, lemon, lime zest, grapefruit); red fruit (raspberry, cherry, red currant, strawberry); tropical (banana, mango, passion fruit, pineapple); orchard (apple, pear, white grape).

Dried and cooked fruit: raisin, sultana, fig, date, prune, dried apricot, jam.

Floral: rose, jasmine, orange blossom, violet, elderflower, honeysuckle.

Nutty: almond, hazelnut, walnut, cashew, peanut skin, marzipan.

Spice: cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, black pepper, cardamom, liquorice, anise.

Woody and earthy: cedar, oak, tobacco, leather, forest floor, mushroom, damp earth, moss.

Caramel and brown sugar: honey, molasses, caramel, toffee, malt, vanilla, brown sugar, maple.

Roast: coffee, toast, biscuit, ash, burnt, smoke.

Creamy: butter, cream, condensed milk.

Green and vegetal: grass, hay, green banana, raw nut, unripe.

Separately from flavour, note the basic tastes — bitter, sour, sweet, salty, savoury — and the mouthfeel: astringent, drying, smooth, waxy, gritty, thin, full-bodied, slow-melting.

Astringency and bitterness get confused constantly, and separating them is the most useful single skill here. Bitterness is a taste, detected on the tongue. Astringency is a physical sensation — tannins binding to the proteins in your saliva, producing a puckering, drying grip on the inside of your cheeks. A cacao can be very bitter and not astringent, or mildly bitter and grippingly astringent. They come from different places and mean different things about how the cacao was fermented and roasted.

Taste each cup twice, at two temperatures

Do a first pass at around 65°C and a second at around 40°C. This is not fussiness — the two passes genuinely give you different information.

Hot, the volatile aromatics are flying off and you get aroma and the top notes: fruit, floral, citrus. Cooler, those have largely gone, and what remains is structure — bitterness, astringency, body, the earthy and woody base, and the finish. Cacao that is thrilling hot and hollow at 40°C is telling you it has aroma but no depth. Cacao that improves as it cools usually has the more interesting base.

Smell each cup twice, too. Once with your nose over the cup before drinking, and once by exhaling gently through your nose after you swallow. Those are different pathways — the first is orthonasal, the second retronasal — and they deliver noticeably different profiles from the same drink. Most of what you think of as flavour arrives by the second route.

Scoring without pretending to be a judge

Formal cacao judging protocols are elaborate. You do not need one. You need something consistent enough to compare across five cups and across sessions.

Rate each on a 1 to 5 scale:

• Aroma intensity
• Acidity — brightness, sourness
• Bitterness
• Astringency
• Body — thin to full
• Complexity — how many distinct things you can name

Then record two things that are not scores. Finish length, measured in actual seconds — swallow, start counting, stop when you can no longer taste anything. Ten seconds is short, forty-five is long, and the difference is one of the clearest markers of quality you can measure at a kitchen table. And three descriptors from the lexicon above. Only three. Forcing yourself to choose is what builds the skill.

Score before you discuss. If someone says "raspberry" out loud, everyone at the table will taste raspberry — suggestion is overwhelmingly powerful in tasting. Write first, talk after.

Where saffron and cardamom fit

These two are useful in a flight, but not as flavours to enjoy. They are calibration.

Saffron is the stigmas of Crocus sativus, and it takes somewhere around 150 flowers to produce a single gram. Three compounds do the work: crocin gives the colour, picrocrocin gives a distinctly bitter taste, and safranal carries the aroma — hay, honey, and a faint metallic note. It needs blooming to release properly: steep three to five threads in a tablespoon of hot liquid for fifteen minutes before it goes anywhere near the cacao. Thrown in dry, it colours the cup and contributes almost nothing.

Cardamom, crushed fresh from the pod, brings a cool, resinous lift.

Use them as a sixth cup at the end — a small amount of each over pure cacao. The purpose is to test whether your palate can still separate a delicate aromatic from the base after five samples. If the saffron reads clearly, you are still tasting properly. If it vanishes into the cacao, you are fatigued and any further sampling is worthless. It is a check on the instrument, not a flavour experiment.

Faults, and what they tell you

Knowing the defects is what turns tasting into judgement. These are the ones you can identify without training:

• Vinegar, ammonia, or a putrid edge — over-fermentation. The beans sat too long.
• Raw, green, sharply astringent, tasting of unripe nut — under-fermentation. Not enough flavour precursors developed.
• Musty, damp cardboard, cellar — mould, usually from poor drying or storage.
• Heavy smoke or ash where none is intended — beans dried over fire with a bad flue. This one is common in cheap cacao and it masks everything else.
• Ham, cured meat — a specific and unpleasant fermentation defect.
• Rancid, stale oil, crayon — the cocoa butter has oxidised. The cacao is old or has been stored warm and in light.
• Flat, one-note, nothing but generic cocoa — not a defect exactly, but the signature of high-yield commodity beans heavily roasted to even them out.

That last one is worth sitting with, because it is what most cacao on the market tastes like, and a flight is the fastest way to hear the difference between it and something with layers.

What Chuncho tends to show

For calibration against your own notes: Chuncho generally opens with bright fruit — red berries or citrus peel — and then moves through earth and warm spice into nuts, with a wild floral note somewhere in the middle. The characteristic is that it moves. Each sip travels through stages rather than presenting one flat impression.

You may not find those exact descriptors, and that is fine. Harvest, drying, and your own palate all shift the picture. If you consistently find something different, trust your notes over ours. The background on why this variety behaves this way is in our piece on heirloom versus commercial cacao.

Running it for six people

The arithmetic, so you buy the right amount:

Six people, five samples each, 60 ml per pour. That is 30 pours, or 1,800 ml of liquid. At the 1:10 ratio that needs 180 g of cacao. Add ten percent for what stays in the pot and on the whisk and call it 200 g. A single 1 lb bag at 454 g runs two sessions with room to spare.

Sixty millilitres is deliberately small — about two ounces. It is enough for three or four proper sips, which is all you need, and it keeps total intake sensible. Five 60 ml pours at 1:10 comes to roughly 75 g of cacao per person across the session, which is above a ceremonial serving. Spread over forty minutes with water in between that is manageable for most adults, but flag it to your guests, and offer smaller 40 ml pours to anyone new to cacao. Anyone sensitive to stimulants should sit out the later cups.

Practical setup: number the cups rather than naming them, and reveal what each one was at the end. Blind tasting produces dramatically more honest notes than knowing which cup is the expensive one. Have water, plain crackers, and a pen for everyone. Put the lexicon in the middle of the table where people can read it.

If you would rather start with one cacao and learn it properly before comparing, the pure ground cacao is the right baseline — and our paste versus powder comparison is a two-cup flight you can run tonight.