Dark roasts and chocolates

0:00 This is room for dark chocolate, so 80% or more, and 100% arabicas. If you love espressos and dark roast, this is room for you. Feel free to suggest anything related. Can also be how you make those, or how you make your coffee, or how you make your chocolate, if you make any, or you can feel free to suggest anything related. 100% dark chocolate is the hardest thing to pull off. There's nothing to hide behind, but it can really be delightful if you like the slightly bitter taste and let it melt in your mouth, like a fine espresso, or like a scotch, or anything of that nature. I really like this brand, and there's one more that I'll post. They're available from a specialty site called Bar & Coco, and if you have a little bit of this, it'll satisfy that craving without taking you into processed food or sugared territory.

0:53 Here's the other one. This one is a little less pure, I think, because it uses cocoa butter or cocoa mass. In addition to just cocoa beans, but it has a really nice twist to it. That's the beauty of the pure chocolate, well, almost pure chocolate. You don't need much of it, and you don't want to have much of it, and it's enough. It's like espresso, like you said, and 100% Arabic, so we could talk about coffees as well, or cigars, but I don't smoke those anymore. These three are the affordable options. The 95 is from Lidl. The other one is a local espresso. I don't know if you can see it. It's a local Estonian one, and it's obviously not in the '90s, but sometimes the ingredients are also pretty important, so it's not exactly about the exact person, but how it's been made and how it's taste and all that jazz.

1:47 Three affordable options to your premium ones. I think the interesting commonalities between things like dark chocolate and coffees and scotches and mezcals and so on is it's bitter, smoky flavors that are very complex. They're not necessarily good. They're not necessarily bad. They just have infinite range because they're complex systems, where something like sugar becomes just too sweet, becomes cloying. It's overwhelming. It's one directional. There's no complexity to it. As you get older, you get tired of the simple flavors, and you get more into the complex flavors that are always playing like notes in a symphony. You could extend this, of course, to all the other things that have bitters in them. That's also why I think sophisticated liquor drinkers also tend to consume bitters. I'm sure Keith has a lot to say on this, given his bartending background.

2:35 Indeed, and it's also about the character. They are pure and raw because there's nothing else to it. For example, with Illy's, the coffee brand, I don't particularly like it too much. I call it like a Toyota of coffees. It's just too plain. There's nothing to it. It's good, but when you taste it the first time, it's not good. The taste is the same whenever. There's nothing between. In the good coffees, good cigars, it develops over the experience. From the first sip, it lingers in your mouth, and it starts to bring some new flavors, some new sensations. It changes within that sip or with that puff or with that bite. It doesn't stay the same.

3:23 That's the thing which is usually missing, but you only get it when you have it. It's a pure thing, not blending it with some milk or blending it with sugar or anything like that, but it's an acquired taste, and you have to get used to it. You cannot have it raw in the beginning. You have to adjust yourself, and it's an art form. Enjoy your Saturday unless you are from the future and it's already Sunday. These are the ones I come back to often. I experiment, try to find something new, but these are the ones I'm more or less over the time coming back to. The first one is Caffe Corsini, Kenya AA Washed. Then there's a Kimba called Iso, Gold and Silver. The final one is, I have to check it out, it's Pian Caffe Coffee Espresso 100% Arabica.

4:20 These are the ones I'm more or less often having in my coffee machine. It actually has a half-life of over 5 hours. So if you drink a cup of coffee in the middle of the day, by the time midnight hits, it's still in your bloodstream. Not that much of it, but it's there, inhibiting your sleep. There's something called Dynamine that works exactly like caffeine. It's not just another stimulant. I mean, it is molecularly identical to how caffeine works, and it only has a half-life of an hour and a half. I've always been tempted to make the next Super Coffee or something, like the next Starbucks with Dynamine, but I've never really had talent for making flavored things. Just a fun little idea I always had in the back of my head.

5:10 Dynamine is a pretty interesting compound, though. A lot of exercise, workout people are using it. That's the reason we're drinking espressos. It has one third of the caffeine of filtered coffee. That's what I believe or heard. I'm convinced people who like dark chocolate and black coffee are superior human beings. Lidl typically has a lot of dark chocolate because half of the country is vegetarian or vegan, so they're not big on milk chocolate. I'm also into German black bread and bread that's made from the four original ingredients: water, salt, yeast, flour. It's not clear to me why human beings, some of them, don't like dark chocolate. I'm also into pure, raw, bitter foods.

5:57 To bring the conversation back to coffee and chocolate, usually the higher the percentage, so like 80, 90, 95 percent dark chocolate, and I don't know the word for coffee, but the earthier it tastes, the better I feel. I'm not really sure why, evolutionarily. As far as bitterness, a few different things. I think the most important thing is that the sweet is a really important counterpoint to sweetness. And so I would say that the reason connoisseurs maybe eventually gravitate towards bitterness is there is more complexity there by balancing the contrary bitter and sweet and acidic, all those things complement each other.

6:46 That's why you have cream and sugar in coffee and tea or however you want it, honey and milk and tea sort of thing. So it's really about balance. Now, that being said, our bitterness receptors are a lot more granular and just they're a tighter flashlight of going over flavors. And the reason is because they detect poison, right? They detect things that are going to kill you. The sweet things are almost always an incentive from some plant to get you to eat it so that you can spread its seed somewhere a few fields over when you stop and have to go to the bathroom. And then you sort of break into subcomponents of bitterness and astringency. The tannin effect, which many people would consider towards the more appetizing side of bitterness, that has a drying effect on the inside of your cheeks and whatnot.

7:37 If you picture yourself, close your eyes and picture yourself smelling fresh leather and it does elicit a response on your palate. But yeah, I'm here for all things bitter. Now technically, according to perception science, the human nose can't smell sweetness. It can't smell that component. It's just a different flavor profile. And there's a kind of common breakdown of sugar, salt, fat, acid, and bitterness astringency. Now those other four, besides sugar, sweetness, can be perceived through the nose, which is 80 or 90% of flavor is actually comes through, is bound or defined by the way it smells. Now there's an intensity component as well that's physically on the palate. So yeah, sugar and sweetness are in fact the most common components of the palate.

8:25 And that's why it's called the least interesting receptor kind of set. But that's also because like sugar evolutionarily, it's universally a good thing. It's just pure calories. It's what other, it's how other, it's how food signals that it is ready and healthy to be eaten. I've just been having the Lindt 100% dark chocolate, but I'm going to try these brands that you suggested. So thank you. Yes, 100% chocolate definitely is delightful and has a lot of flavor. A lot of character. I find that it becomes more delightful the more you get used to it. That might be perhaps because it's hard to overdo 100% chocolate, but you can get used to it and that adds more flavor, at least for me. I've also been eating Brian Johnson's nutty pudding recipe.

9:16 It's basically just walnuts, macadamia nuts, protein powder, and cocoa powder in it. And that's how I'm consuming some of my cocoa. There is no sugar or sweetener except for the berries. It's really tasty. If someone wants to try it, I'll drop a link to it. Keith, that was enlightening. I had forgot about hearing that somewhere before that you can't smell sweet and about poison and bitterness. Evolutionarily speaking, that makes sense. I'd be really interested in how many variables for the receptors, how many variables you would have to modify in a taste to get from? I think that's a really good question.