Review Rundown

As much as this blog is probably going to be me rambling on about where I found a drink and what I thought of it and blah blah blah, there has to be some level of consistency and something that allows for comparison. So I'm going to implement a set of criteria. Each drink will receive a rating from 1-5 on each of the following:

Taste: Of course, this is probably the most important. We don't buy hot chocolate so that we can place it on a shelf of our house and look at it. We buy it so we can drink it and it can taste good.

Value: What good is a cup of chocolate that you can't afford? Conversely, a low price can make a drink taste that much sweeter!

Presentation: Whipped cream, chocolate sauce, a cherry... all those little things can go a long way.

Drinks bought "to go" will have an additional criteria:

Convenience: A lid, a flap to reseal it, a sleeve to keep you from burning your hands... if you can't carry it around, what's the point?


I considered adding an average score to the end, but decided against it - for one, it can end up with fractions as small as 1/8 (since I often give ratings like 3.5), and it also can be misleading, as not all criteria deserve the same weight (personally I consider taste much more important than presentation!).

Mocha Addendum

Project Cocoa is primarily about hot chocolate. However, it often comes to pass that I'm tired and need a little more than just sugar. At these times, I'm hardly going to turn down a shot of espresso in my hot chocolate - and this, children, is what we call a mocha. (I think.)

So in this blog, I'll also be discussing mochas I drink! But this leads to an important disclaimer:

The Mocha Disclaimer
Beyond mochas, I am not a big coffee person. I can't tell good coffee from bad coffee or good espresso from bad espresso. When I discuss the taste of a mocha, I'm talking about everything but the taste of the espresso, since in that case I'd have no idea what I'm saying. It may be the case that some particularly good espresso would make the mocha taste inexplicably better to me, or vice versa, but I can't say for sure.

Our tale begins

Alright, I'll finally write the first post here. Project Cocoa is an idea I had last winter, as I developed a staggering hot chocolate addiction. I bought hot chocolate from cafés all over Manhattan, and quickly came to realize:

All hot chocolate is not created equal.

Well okay, really I already knew that. But with as often as I was drinking hot chocolate, the differences were becoming pretty apparent, and with the discovery of both disappointing and exciting cups of hot chocolate, I started wanting a place to write things down. I decided to start a hot chocolate blog - somewhere I can tell the world (or whoever happens to Google "Hot chocolate ratings" or whatever could possibly lead them here) what I happen to think of hot chocolate.

Of course, now that I spent so long forgetting or not having time to start the blog, it's summer now. Hardly hot chocolate season. Fortunately, I'm not spending this summer in hot, muggy New York - I'm home with my family in the suburbs of Washington. Washington has never really understood the concept of summer, so it's still cloudy and a bit chilly here. As long as Washington never catches on and notices it's June, I should be fine with my hot beverages.

Well, with all this out of the way, I will conclude this absurdly long post. Let Project Cococa begin!!