[Workaccount2]

What are some of you choice bars? Recently I tried a few single origin bars and was floored by how different they tasted amongst themselves, and how dramatically different they were to your run of the mill godiva or lindt.

[HighFreqAsuka]

Fruition is my entry recommendation. Every bar they make is good. Then Castronova, Goodnow Farms, Askinosie, Soma, and Dick Taylor. A good heuristic for evaluating a new brand is if the package tells you where the beans are from and if the ingredients list is “cocoa beans, sugar”.

EDIT: I realize you asked about bars not brands, but I’m in transit and brands was easier than individual bars. I’m a huge fan of the Askinosie orange bar in particular.

[mapt]

How much of this is variation between farms and how much is variations between batches? If the taste of every batch (a given farm's crop in a given season) were effectively random we would also see large variations from farm to farm. The theory are suggesting is that a given farm (or a given country, or a given brand) is long-term consistent and different from one another, but a double blind difference taste test at low N would be insufficient; You would need to test/quantify other forms of variation as well.