This training has been created not to teach you how to taste, but rather how to take what you already know about tasting and apply it to judging chocolate.
Date: 18th October 2025 (Saturday)
Time: Start at 12pm and finish by approx. 1:00pm
Location: Zoom (Link will be provided before the training to registered participants)
The training will be led by:
Judith Lewis – AoC Board Member, Grand Jury judge, and Wine Judge
We will be using five bars from COCOA RUNNERS so as many people as possible will be able to access these bars. The expectation is that you will be able to translate the experience you have of running through judging criteria with these bars to the judging you will be doing for the Academy.
We will run through some initial topics around what you should know ahead of judging such as what the timings are for judging and how long you should spend judging each day (we send between 75 and 150 samples to judges), where chocolate comes from, how it is made, how to use and expand your scent library, and a little on how we specifically taste chocolate.
We will then move on to the five bars we will be tasting together and taste them and run through how we would judge each bar, with notes around rough-ground, flavoured, and other bar types you might encounter, plus comments which are essential for all judges to complete.
At the end of this training, you’ll have a better handle on how we specifically approach judging and hopefully feel confident about tackling your judging boxes. This year we are gifting judges a special judge badge pin on completing their judging (either posted or given at the awards ceremony) and for in-person judges we alos have a bag with some extra bars.
This training is meant for people with a pre-existing working knowledge of how to taste and will not teach you specifically how to taste chocolate but rather focuses on judging using existing tasting skill.
Grand Jury for both flavoured and/or plain bars will be expected to have completed this training.
The bars we will be tasting together are:
These will be listed as soon as we can confirm against Cocoa Runners inventory.
