A Month Of Ocumare

Aug 2

I first tasted Amano's Ocumare Village in late July of 2021. It left a strong impression with me; I remember thinking that the depth and complexity of its flavor rivals To'ak, at less than half the price. In my tasting notes, I wrote,

It's like the air two feet above creek rocks in shadow. It reminds me so strongly of turning over a rock to find a blue-tailed salamander, just a few minutes before the wind picks up and it starts to storm. Just beautiful.

A year later, as an exploration of perception over time, I wanted to taste the exact same chocolate every day for a full month. I chose Ocumare Village.

Why did I taste the same chocolate every day for a month? What did I hope to learn?

Although I was driven by a few specific curiosities, I mainly just wanted to see what would happen.

In my work as a rationality researcher and developer, I've been focused lately on perceptual dexterity, the capacity to examine a phenomenon from many different angles. How can you turn an idea the way you might turn a puzzle box? How can you think a familiar thought as though with a different mind?

Because any mind is arranged slightly differently in any two moments, one path to perceptual dexterity is simply to be patient. To look, to wait, and then to look again.

When I engage in this kind of practice with abstract concepts, such as geometry or my relationship with the study of history, I tend to encounter pretty big obstacles to communicating clearly about what I've observed, how I've reasoned, and why I've concluded from it what I have. To get a handle on how to think and talk about what I'm doing, I thought it might help to try this with something relatively concrete. And if I'm going to pay close attention to something every single day for a month, why not make it something I love?

But beyond my work in rationality, I was interested in some things about chocolate tasting itself. For example, how much do my fleeing moods impact my experience of a chocolate? What else can determine how a chocolate smells and tastes to me at a given time? If I expose myself to the same set of stimuli over and over again, what will the familiarity do to my overall perception of the chocolate? Perhaps it will become boring? And what is the full range of experiences I can discover through observation of this single bar of chocolate?

I am an aesthete, and I think what I did this month is my own analog of worship. I knew I'd found something beautiful, but I didn't yet know what or how I was contributing to the artistic experience; I didn't know what was the chocolate, and what was me. By tasting this chocolate over and over, with artistic sensitivity, for thirty days in a row, I hoped I would come to know Amano's Ocumare Village with greater clarity than I could ever manage in a single glance.

At the bottom of this post, I'll share all of my tasting notes for the whole month. (Well, all of my notes on Ocumare Village, at any rate. I taste kind of a lot of chocolate, for an ameteur.) But before that, I'll discuss the experience.

What exactly did I do?

Let's start with, "What even is a chocolate tasting, for Logan Strohl?" Because I did not just monch a bar of chocolate every day while watching TV. For me, "chocolate tasting" is something quite specific.

Physically, I begin by sniffing the chocolate, usually for at least thirty seconds. I bring it right up next to my nose and breathe deeply. My breath gradually warms up the surface of the chocolate and disturbs the heavier volatile compounds. Then I put a piece in my mouth and suck on it until it's melted most of the way, which takes about a minute. After that I chew the chocolate. I usually eat four small pieces total, and I usually let each piece warm in my mouth at least a little before chewing it. This takes me between three and ten minutes.

Temporally, I break the tasting into three phases: Nose, mouth, and reflection. "Nose" is whatever's going on before I put the chocolate in my mouth. "Mouth" is whatever's going on after I've put the chocolate in my mouth. (I don't often bother trying to distinguish between "scents" and "flavors".)

"Reflection" is what I write after I've swallowed the chocolate, and it's where I step away from the immediate sensory experiences a little to talk about how the chocolate impacted me overall, or anything else that's going on in my mind as a result. If I really loved or really hated a chocolate, "Reflection" is where I'll say so. On the 9th I reflected, "It's interesting that the 'chalky flavor' does not really seem to be a flavor note so much as a textural property, and maybe a physical drying out of my mouth as the tannins bind to my salivary proteins." I at least somewhat avoid these high-level judgements and stories in earlier phases of tasting, in an attempt to stay open to the sensations themselves.

Sometimes I add a "Note" at the top, which is usually about context. I might say "I'm at a coffee shop" or "I'm in a hurry today".

Psychologically (which is, of course, the fun part), there are five periods. They have a sort of sequence and rhythm, but they do not always unfold with perfect linearity. Sometimes I loop back to an earlier period, when I want to focus on something else or to find my bearings.

There is always an acquaintance period. I close my eyes and focus on my experience of the chocolate, clearing out a space for it and watching for the first sensations to spring up. I'll usually note a few short and fairly literal words: "Sweet", "bitter", "rich".

Next is a sinking in, where I become aware of more subtle features of the experience. This happens by patiently waiting with soft focus. I usually end up saying something during this part about how the chocolate makes me feel. With Ocumare, I tended to say things like "calm", "cool", "alive".

Third is wandering. I boot up my imagination and just watch what happens, letting my mind wander in contact with the chocolate. I end up with flashes of images, textures, motions, sounds. "A smooth stone." "A child." "A field."

Fourth is filling in. Having found a few pieces of images, I begin to flesh them out and modify them so that they more closely match my experience of the chocolate. If there was "coolness", I ask myself what sort of coolness. Cool like snow? A cool breeze? Given a prompt like this, my imagination usually takes off, filling in a detailed scene or setting that resonates with my experience: "Cool like the water five feet down in a pond. Cool like shade beneath the moving branches." On the 5th I reflected, "Once I had the abandoned house, it was easy and fun to feel my way toward versions of it that fit my experience of the chocolate."

Once I'm satisfied, it's time for reflection, where I step back and take note of whatever stands out in the aftermath of the experience. I often don't know how I feel about a chocolate overall before I get to this point.

What did I vary this month? What did I do differently than usual?

One thing that varied a lot was context. My usual context for chocolate tasting is alone at my kitchen table, or sometimes with my partner Duncan. But because I was fitting this into my life every single day, I ended up tasting chocolate in all sorts of contexts. I needed to be flexible to make it work. Here are the unusual contexts I noted down:

Outside on my deck, surrounded by the sounds of birds, wind in the trees, and the creek below.
In a coffee shop.
In a hurry.
In the bath.
Right after brushing my teeth.
Right after trying several other chocolates.
First thing in the morning.
While the air was full of wildfire smoke.
In a cramped airplane cabin above the clouds.
In the middle of a workshop, surrounded by people who were occasionally interacting with me.
On a car ride, with Duncan interviewing me about it aloud.
As hot chocolate; I melted a bar it into whole milk using a frother.
I let it melt completely in the sun, then I lapped it up with my tongue.

Another thing that varied was which mental postures and mental motions I chose to use.

I was much less deliberate about my choices of mental motions than I could have been. I mostly did what seemed like a good idea in the moment. In the future, I'd like to try a version of this where I decide in advance on a few specific things I'd like to do with my mind. But without any planning, here's some of the stuff I ended up doing in my brain.

During reflections, I often compared my experience to previous experiences with the same chocolate. (Of course.)

Once, I deliberately interpreted familiar parts of the experience in unfamiliar ways.

On a couple of days, I chose a particular feature of the experience and focused on that. Once it was "coolness". Another time "chalkiness".

Once, when I was distracted by a conversation happening nearby, I compared my experience of the chocolate to my experience of the conversation.

Instead of writing with words, I painted my experience of the chocolate as abstract watercolor.

For several days, off and on starting around the 15th, I relaxed my deliberate attempt to find imagery that matches my experience of the chocolate, and worked with much freer association. This was definitely my favorite thing that happened during this exploration.

The phenomenon was especially prominent, and interesting!, when I played the game "one word at a time". I'd start with a short phrase, such as "a piece of", and then tack on the very first word that came to mind, regardless of whether it was grammatical, or fitting, or anything else. This is how I got "Someone eating the last bite of a cloven-hoofed demon" and also "How do you get to the place where the well holds the kingdom of mushroom elves?"

The hit rate of "one word at a time" is mediocre. It sacrifices accuracy for breadth. I don't actually think "the last bite of a cloven-hoofed demon" is an especially apt description of this chocolate (though I do recognize something relevant in both "cloven-hoofed" and "demon"). Perhaps I'm unlikely to blindly stumble onto something as penetrating as "the serrated blade edge of a rex begonia leaf" by freely wandering like this.

It's amazing, though, for wandering into parts of association space I'd otherwise have neglected—which means this is probably a jackpot for perceptual dexterity.

I expect an approach to chocolate tasting that puts freedom of association under some kind of tight control, dialing it way up or way down according to an intelligent strategy, would produce far more precise and accurate descriptions.

I quite like this freer method, and I want to spend a lot more time in it. It's something I've experienced before this month, but previously I've only been able to access it reliably on cannabis. I'm really pleased to have figured out how to do this sober.

How did my perceptions of the chocolate change across the month?

If I were to tell a very simplified story of how my Ocumare perception changed over time, it would be this: Ocumare started out as mostly earthy, became almost overwhelmingly sour, and then returned to earthiness.

Sometimes, as in my initial tasting, I perceived almost no sourness at all; my experience of the chocolate was mostly about earthiness. But sometimes the metallic sourness was so loud that I could barely hear anything else. On those days, when the sourness was especially loud, I'm not sure I could have recognized Ocumare in a blind tasting that also included fruit-forward brands like Ritual and Videri. I might have thought, "This one has got to be Ritual."

It wasn't random. My perceptions of sourness definitely waxed in the middle of the month. It seems that although I noted some sourness in nearly every tasting, often mentioning raspberries specifically, the strength of the sourness increased from the 11th through the 15th, after which it gradually faded back into balance and harmony with the other flavors.

What was going on with this?

Perhaps the batches of chocolate from which the bars were made weren't perfectly uniform, and I just happened to pick out a sequence of bars with especially sour ones in the middle. Perhaps the bars experienced different environmental conditions, like temperature and humidity, during storage and transportation.

But according to my leading hypothesis, the variation in sour perception was all me, not the chocolate. I now believe that I'm more likely to perceive sourness when I'm stressed. In the future, I plan to save exciting new tastings for times when I'm feeling chill.

Why do I suspect the sour stress hypothesis?

I co-ran a rationality workshop from the 13th through the 18th. It was extremely stressful for me, and the worst of the stress happened on the 14th and 15th (after which I began to adapt).

"A high sharp sour like raspberry," I wrote on the 13th. On the 14th I reflected that, "Seeing past the sourness has become a challenge." From the 15th: "Raspberries scattered on a rock in shade. Someone eating plums at midnight."

Quick googling suggests that many people get a metallic taste in their mouth when they're anxious, though so far I haven't found any satisfying accounts of why. "High cortisol levels" and "norepinephrine" sound like clues, but I don't understand how they lead to this phenomenon. Does this happen more toward the input-from-tastebuds level, or is there a bias toward sourness during anxious interpretation? Is there more sourness such that everything else is drowned out, or does anxiety decrease the volume of other flavors? Could it be that the default state of human taste is "metallically sour", and wellbeing somehow involves a sourness-cancellation effect? (Probably not, but it's consistent with my observations.)

I was really relieved when my experience of this chocolate started to return to "overall earthy" rather than "overall sour". It's the earthiness that I loved about it in the first place. "Like the air two feet above creek rocks in shadow," I wrote in July 2021, before adding Ocumare to my list of favorites. I'm not a huge fan of fruity chocolate, and it's the "pennies and vomit" flavor that leads me to avoid chocolate processed in Southeast Asia.

There is a disconfirming note from the 23rd, on which I wrote, "Sour raspberry old penny vomit," and "Super duper metallic. Like my mouth has electric current running over it." I don't remember what was happening that day, but I was neither traveling nor preparing for a workshop.

This hypothesis is really just a trailhead for further investigation. If I wanted to be more sure about this,

I'd try tracking the ambient flavor of my mouth before eating anything, while also noting my subjective stress level (or perhaps directly measuring cortisol!)
I'd try tasting the least sour things I could find, to see if I sometimes perceive them as sour anyway, and
I'd try tasting a random selection of chocolates I've tasted before, noting my subjective stress level, and I'd compare the second set of notes to the first set of notes.

Addendum: Oh gosh, I just thought of another hypothesis that seems almost equally strong, at least if I disregard my knowledge that anxiety causes a metallic taste for many people: The intensity of sour perceptions also tracked my hormonal cycle. I now want to know whether things taste more sour during the luteal phase.

Quick googling suggests that taste buds are less sensitive during weeks 3 and 4 of the menstrual cycle. Things should taste more bland, and more strongly flavored foods will taste better. This does sort of track my relative insensitivity to the non-sour flavors, but it doesn't account for an emphasis on sourness. Still, I can't cleanly rule this out.

What is my impression of Ocumare now? How is it different from my initial impression?

I feel like I've removed whatever rose-colored glasses I was originally wearing while tasting this chocolate, or at least while remembering my initial tasting of it. Not every encounter with the chocolate felt great. Sometimes, when my mind is a certain way, there is vomit, fermentation, and pennies. There are scents and flavors available here that it's easy not to love.

Overall, though, I continue to see this chocolate as beautiful. It is spectacularly deep and complex. Its character is grounded and alive. Though certain parts of my experience of it change depending on my context, mood, and perhaps physiology, it pretty consistently leads me to associations with fresh water, dusty rocks, dappled shadows, and earth.

The main thing I've learned about this chocolate is that contrast is at the heart of Ocumare.

Some chocolates are like major or minor chords, building themselves around a single note to create a single mood. For example, Videri's Tanzania builds an experience around dried cherries, and I'm left with a wholehearted impression of an old man in a smoking jacket having whisky and cherry cordials.

Other chocolates seem to do multiple contrasting things at once, and cannot easily be reduced to a single uncomplicated image. Of these, there are two sorts:

One kind of multi-directional chocolate is what I think of as dissociated. Ritual's Fleur De Sel 70%, for example, strikes me as a perfectly good chocolate reminiscent of a hibernating brown bear, but also for some reason there's salt. The salt goes a totally different direction from everything else, and there's nothing to draw it in or integrate it with the rest of the experience.

I usually feel this way about salted chocolates, but this happens with more than just salt, and it can also happen in more than two directions. Of Om Nom's "Superchocoberry Barleynibblynuttylicious", I wrote "It's overwhelming and confusing, and I think I'm instinctively trying to protect myself from it." Apparently it's hard to get inclusions right; if you simply start with a decent chocolate and then add something yummy to it, you'll probably wind up with a dissociated chocolate. Same with plain chocolate if you emphasize fruit above all else, or if you use a lot of sugar. Balance becomes difficult.

But when you do multi-directionality right, you get something like Ocumare, which is held in balanced tension between multiple poles.

It seems to me that Ocumare has three separate axes of balanced tension. It balances between wet and dry, between earth and fruit, and between dark and light.

It doesn't accomplish this balance by being neutral; it doesn't simply decline to be wet or dry. Rather, it's both distinctly watery and distinctly dusty, yet these flavors are somehow integrated into a single complex experience.

It's like the B note hanging on a C major 7 chord. The B is naturally discordant with the C, but adding G and E integrate the two into a cohesive and fascinating experience.

What’s new in my impression is that I can feel the shape of the entire chord, discordant notes included.

Because of the balanced tension across three different axes, I think Ocumare may be a chocolate that requires multiple tastings to fully appreciate. But of course, saying that, I wonder if nearly all art chocolates have more to say than I am able to hear in a single sitting.

What was it like to do this project?

Duncan asks,

I'm curious about your mood throughout the project. Like, was it ever burdensome or tiring, were you ever reluctant, was it like doing pushups where you had to drag yourself to do it but once you were in it it was refreshing, etc. What was this like compared to doing a single tasting?

It definitely wasn't burdensome or tiring overall, though something related to diligence was part of my experience. But "devotion" seems like a much better way to describe it.

I felt devoted to this project. I'm not religious, but it reminded me a lot of religious devotion. The tastings felt almost like daily prayers, for someone who's genuinely devout.

Sometimes when I realized I hadn't done a tasting yet that day, especially on very stressful days, I felt a moment of "aw shit, another thing I have to fit in". But those moments were brief, and they tended to open up into a sense of opportunity.

You see, I like chocolate. A lot. And I like Ocumare specifically. I've recognized it as a piece of beautiful art, and there's nothing that inspires in me a more unified will than beauty.

Compared to a single tasting: It reminds me of the difference between infatuation and a marriage of three decades. I went beyond a glimpse, beyond simple appreciation. I really got to know this chocolate, and now I love it more for what it is than for what I enjoyed at first glance.

Overall, this project was interesting, grounding, satisfying, illuminating, and fulfilling. I'm very glad I did it.

What advice do I have for others who want to try similar projects?

Duncan also asked me,

What advice would you give to your past self, or to someone else who wanted to try a month of [attending to the same experience over and over again]?

And I... drew a blank. I think I nailed this project, and I also have almost no idea how I knew to do exactly what I did. No conceptual, intellectual-understanding-type idea, anyway.

But then he said to me, "Imagine that each of Mitch, Cheryl, Sadie, Niel, and Bryan tried this project, and each of them made their own mistake. What mistakes did they make, and what could they have done instead?"

And that brilliant prompt produced some answers.

(I've changed the names and pronouns, but each of these represents one of my friends. It also represents the entire group of people that is similar to them, so one of these could be you!)

Mitch formed an initial impression of the chocolate, then spent a lot of his attention during each subsequent tasting comparing his current experience to his original experience. I did some of this during the reflection phase, but Mitch's mistake was to do it 20x more strongly than me, and not to save it for the end of the tasting. As a result, he was not able to see the chocolate freshly each time, as though with new eyes. He mainly saw what he already knew how to see. My advice to Mitchel is to start each tasting by pretending to take an amnesia pill, and to forbid himself from writing down judgements.

Cheryl made the same mistake as Mitch, but she only made it five times before shifting to a higher leverage project. My advice to her (in addition to the Mitchel advice) is to get clear on the value of "every day for a month" projects in general, and to remind herself whenever she falters that a 30-day commitment is part of how this works.

Sadie did almost everything right, but never managed to debrief. She didn't end up with any new concepts, insights, or tools that she can use on purpose or communicate about, because the whole series of experiences stayed disconnected, eventually evaporating into the past.

Neil didn't manage to make time for this. They thought it seemed like a cool idea when they were in a social setting where people were talking about it, but once the people were gone, they found that their other obligations got in the way. I think if Neil really wants to give this a shot, they should probably combine it with social time. Pick a work buddy, and taste chocolate together during the lunch break.

Bryan was way too concerned with accuracy and literal description. He was unwilling to describe anything he didn't know how to articulate in literal terms, or that might possibly have had more to do with him than with the chocolate. As a result, most of the subtleties of his experience were banished from peripheral attention before he could become fully aware of them. My advice to Bryan is that he re-frame this as an art project. I think he should experiment with writing bad, nonsense poetry inspired by his experience of the chocolate, with an attitude of "finding out what happens". And he should definitely play "One Word At a Time".

Finally: Here, unedited and unabridged, are my tasting notes for Ocumare Village.

Nose: Rich, dark, and earthy. Sweet. Stones and moss and bicycles riding through the cool shadows near a creek. Calm but assertive and vibrant.
Mouth: Sweet. Bitter. Calming. Pacifying. Peace-ifying. An open air spa lounge in a forest. Cool, like spring water flowing over your feet, like lupines waving in the mountain meadow breeze. The scent of a blue wildflower growing behind a waterfall. Dreaming on a pillow of moss.
Reflection: It's amazing how much more calm I feel now than when I started. I was feeling really overwhelmed, almost panicking before. Now it's like something has released in my solar plexus and I feel much more relaxed and open.

Note: I'm in a Starbucks before my private dance lesson with Ashe.
Nose: Surprisingly bitter? Like a little bit like vomit? There's some sweetness. It's hard to detect anything in particular. The scent feels very quiet, and so many things around me are much louder.
Mouth: Sweet. Roundness. Stones. River stones. The intro to Name Of the Wind. Something about the silence of a river-smoothed stone. Brown and green and blue. Rolling. Awash. Plugged in.
Reflection: It's amazing how much more difficult it is for me to hear the complexity of this chocolate in this environment. I don't feel like I'm suffering here, but clearly some of my mental capacities are greatly diminished. I wonder if I've been underestimating the effects of sensory environments on my mind because I've been using "how much am I suffering" as a proxy. It's entirely possible to be blind and stupid without hurting.

Nose: Sweet, calm, gentle. A piece of a cloud. The wispy kind that evaporates into the blue air as you're watching it. The water cycle. The rain falling seeping pooling running collecting evaporating.
Mouth: A sour note, a bitter note, sweet. Coating. Releasing. Relaxing. Spreading out over a surface. A surprising prickling in the top of my mouth, like riding a motorcycle in the rain. Chewy. There's actually a sour fruitiness here. It reminds me of kiwi fruit.
Reflection: I think I deliberately heard different things this time. With the clouds and rain, I interpreted something somewhat familiar in a different way, and saw slightly different features of it. With the sour fruitiness, I have a feeling I've been overlooking something fairly prominent in this chocolate, because I don't like it as much as the subtler things to be found when I peer around behind the boldest flavors.

Nose: Sweet calm happy. A little bit of a funky mossy sour thing. A piece of quiet.
Mouth: Washing over. The smell of the shadows. A little bit of sour bitter like vomit. Chocolate crinkle cookies. Someone holding space for you. Lounging on a tree branch over a creek. Watching catfish hunting for grasshoppers. Spitting watermelon seeds.
Reflection: I appreciate that this chocolate is a slow melter. I finish with the first little piece and think the thing is almost over, but in fact there are three more pieces on my plate. Also, I noticed this time an impulse to experiment with more lenses. I'd like to try tasting this chocolate as though I hate it, as though I love it, as though I'm angry, as through I'm a cat.

note: I prepared this as hot chocolate today. I melted 3oz into a cup of whole milk in a milk frother.
Nose: Warm, steamy, sweet, chocolaty. Comforting. A little chalky. Bitter. Hot
Mouth: Incredibly comforting texture and temperature. Round warm flavor, something a little ghostly underneath, like an abandoned house at night. Not like kids exploring the house and scaring each other for fun; more like a girl who sneaks off into the woods at night then sits in this house reading by candlelight, having befriended the ghosts. Also the path of her walk, the stones she steps on and over, the leaves she overturns.
Reflection:
- It seems I've accidentally made a huge improvement in my hot chocolate preparation method. Today I forgot to put in the chocolate until after the frother was all done, so I turned it to the "cold froth" setting and let it mix the chocolate into the already-hot milk. The whole drink is now much more pillowy, the froth denser, than when I add the chocolate in the middle and only froth once.
- I think my favorite approach to tasting so far involves grabbing onto an image and then fleshing it out. Once I had the abandoned house, it was easy and fun to feel my way toward versions of that that fit my experience of the chocolate.
- As a hot chocolate, Ocumare Village is unusually warm and rich, while still being full of life. A lot of hot chocolates this warm and comforting are sort of sleepy, things to drink by a fire while the snow falls. This one has bright childlike excitement in it, like a young adult fantasy novel. Not like the events in the novel—those would be harsh and scary in real life—but like reading the novel, which is cozy and full of life at the same time.

Nose: A little bit of a mushroomy fungal smell. Reminds me of petrichor. Deeply calming. I just want to keep quietly smelling this.
Mouth: A bit sharp. A bit sour. The sound of a strong wind through the treetops in an oak forest. The color of shadow. The way it feels to a cat when you run your hand heavily all the way down the length of its back. The motion of slow waves on a lake.
Reflection: A way of tasting chocolate I've not written down before: Name something for several senses. The sound of x, the color of y, the feeling of z, the motion of w, the temperature of q.

Nose: Sweet, calm, deep, rocky.
Mouth: Sour hit at the start, opens into sweetness. More pennies today than before. A little chalky. Calm settled. An evening stroll. The powdery feel of limestone, or dust on a smooth boulder.
Reflection: I noticed a lot more dusty chalkiness today.

Nose: There's kind of an earthy vomitty smell. It's interesting how even though I continue to love this chocolate just as much as before, my associations are coming more slowly and I'm more aware of the raw olfactory sensations. I can recognize them as similar to more things than just ones I have positive associations with. But it definitely also still reminds me of the air above a creek. If I sort of set aside the creekness of it, the part that isn't well described by that is more sour, sort of like the slightly fermented melon I had earlier this evening. "Slightly fermented" is a good match.
Mouth: It's just so fucking interesting. I think it's the combination of fermented, earthy, sweet, and slightly chalky that renders this chocolate so surprising or unusual. It really feels like art made by dried creek stones. The limestone layers of a creek bed lifted up and carried to an art school, bringing with them their memories of moss, water skippers, and the shadows cast by lush leafy branches overhead.
Reflection: There was a ton of reflection blended in with the simpler perceptions today, but I note that I seem to be becoming more aware of this chocolate's sourness over time.
Duncan notes that this is like Progeny by Hanz Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard from the Gladiator soundtrack, and he is quite right.

Note: I've been more aware of the sourness lately. I'd like to try paying more attention to one other particular part of the flavor. Maybe what I've been calling "chalky".
Nose: Warm and cool and alive. Sour and sweet. Happy, green, purple, calm, like a content snake. I detect very little chalk in the nose. It might be a little bit like cellars.
Mouth: The texture has a very fine but still present graininess that I'm inclined to call "chalky". I wonder how much of this perception is the texture. There's a sensation of astringency, the dryness of underripe fruit. But what about the flavor? There's something that clings to the roof of my mouth and creates almost a burning sensation, like raw walnuts. There's a little bit of ghostliness behind the bolder flavors, something waiting. Something like very old library books that haven't been checked out in many years. The chalk and the coolness seem to go together. It's dust in shadows, not dust in sunbeams. I'm imagining ghosts studying history in basement libraries.
Reflection: It's interesting that the "chalky flavor" does not really seem to be a flavor note so much as a textural property, and maybe a physical drying out of my mouth as the tannins bind to my salivary proteins.

Note: Deliberately speedy today. I'm in a bit of a hurry.
Nose: Sweet sharp sour fermented cool underneath something quiet green purple.
Mouth: The way the sky is before a tornado. Green frothing cool humid. Watching the tornado sky from the entrance to a tornado shelter, the cold musty scent rising up from below.
Reflection: My experience of the flavor of this chocolate is opening up and changing so much that when I started this tasting today, I seriously considered the possibility that I'd gotten chocolate from multiple batches, or that the flavor compounds in the chocolate were changing with age. But I don't think either of those hypotheses is likely to account for this. It takes me several days to work my way through a single bar, and I experience the change on the scale of a few days, so it's not about batches. And I think that dark chocolate keeps well for months when stored at an appropriate temperature, so I don't think it's that either. I think it must be my mind that is changing.

Note: This is the first thing I've eaten today.
Nose: Sharp, beautiful, bitter, like tears on moving day as you drive away from your house looking back, and it's raining.
Mouth: It's so deep, pretty, satisfying. The sourness is like licking blood from the scrape on your arm when you've been playing in the woods and got snagged on a thorn bush. But also it's raining. There's not a lot of lightness brightness here. It's quite a cool dark water and shadows chocolate. Also where'd the chalkiness go? I think I'm perceiving it more as "coolness" now. Cool like a stone beneath your bare feet in the morning.
Reflection: It's interesting that becoming more aware of the sourness hasn't made me see this chocolate as brighter. I think I expect sour fruity chocolates to involve bright colors and fast/exciting/adventurous things. This one does not. I'd like to study it's "darkness" in the future.

Note: Paying attention to coolness today. Also, I recently brushed my teeth, oops!
Nose: A sharpness and then sinking into cool. Cool how? Cool like snow? Not quite. Cool like breeze? No, it's more still than that. Cool like calm. But also the sharpness is racing. I don't think I've noticed that before. The coolness is underneath. Cool like the water five feet down in a pond. Cool like shade beneath the moving branches.
Mouth: It actually feels physically cold. I'm aware of my tongue being warmer than the chocolate. What else is cool here? It's so hard to pin down. All I know right now is that it isn't the sourness. Something about the foundation. Creek bed. Something like a director or choreographer? That's not quite right, but certainly something behind or beneath the show.
Reflection: I'm not satisfied with this. I have a general, though more precise, impression of coolness, but I can't really see where it's coming from. I'd like to know how this impression is happening.

Note: I'm on a plane.
Nose: Kind of airy breezy. Something orange. Sourness. Sweet bitter.
Mouth: A sharp high sour like raspberry. Where are the low notes? Orange rind I think? I can't hear this much because of the people talking behind me. Maybe I'll compare it to the people talking behind me. The high prominent sort-of-grating quality of the woman's voice reminds me of the sourness. There's nothing in this chocolate nearly as loud as the overhead announcement that catering is out of snacks and juice. There's a playfulness that's like the man teasing his wife by talking about moving out of their house and into a repurposed aircraft cabin. The playfulness is sweet and sour.
Reflection: Although the auditory distractions made focus much more difficult, I do think that the altitude also mattered. I think many of the perceptions that tend to render my experience of this chocolate "complex" are simply absent here. There just isn't the depth. This experience reminds me much more of Videri than of Amano. I'd call it "fruit-forward", without much behind the fruit.

Note: I'm in the bath.
Nose: It smells sort of bitter and pukey. It reminds me of darkness and being sick. It also reminds me of moss and shadows.
Mouth: Raspberry. Raspberries scattered on a rock in shade. Someone eating plums at midnight. The way it feels to go for a run when there's no reason to be home before dark. A magnificent gentleman swirling his cloak.
Reflection: When I got to "someone eating plums at midnight", I suddenly unlocked the ability to "make less sense". I'm not sure any of the things I wrote resonated super much, but I'm fascinated by the transition. I wrote "The way it feels to go for a run when there's no reason to be home before dark" one word at a time, the way Steph played truth or dare, not having any idea what word would come after the one I'd just typed. Why did that happen? Was it because I was in the bath? Was it because plain old CBD is adequate to unlock this for me? Right before it started, I was feeling frustrated. I was struggling. I wrote "Raspberries scattered on a rock in shade," and I was frustrated that I'd said "rock in shade" so many times before, and that I've been so focused on "sour". But what happened RIGHT before the transition? What happened when I moved from that frustration into the other thing? Words happened in my head and I didn't discard them before I could know what they were. Why didn't I discard them? Perhaps because I was yearning for something different? Perhaps because I had a mostly shitty day and I had a feeling of decreasing marginal impact of shitty things, so I thought I might as well make the writing dirty and inaccurate and imperfect? That sounds like it might just be true.

Note: I did this tasting in a social setting, sitting near some people at a workshop.
Nose: Bitter like a snake. Orange rind and purple, a sharp pair of oysters playing volleyball. A piece of chocolate cake, the sprinkles burning. Someone picking apples that are rotten with worms.
Mouth: The back of a wet dungeon, purple and green. A party summer masacre the risen dead shrieking. A rope of licorice, the chalk crunch of mint melt-aways. What if there were a person who wanted to eat the whole sky? How would I devour what I am? Somehow perhaps there is a [I was interrupted at this point.]

Nose: "parfume", green moss slime eel snakes. Bright deep rich confusion clouds.
Mouth: Caramel orange sweet darkness river serpent
Note: I was right beside someone's coffee, an iced coffee with I think maple syrup and some kind of creamer. I think that's where my confusions come from.

Nose: Warm and red-brown. Hinto of BO? Sharp and mildly dark. The wet puddle damp of a cave.
Mouth: Sharp pennies. Penny acid, sweet opening up. A black cake, black all through. A piece of the red drawer that holds a forgotten doll. Someone eating the last bite of a cloven-hoofed demon. Chalk in the bite. The way a morning feels after a storm.

Nose: Bitter sharp sweet. Dirt underneath a rock. Someone who wants to go for a drive late at night to see the stars.
Mouth: Sweet, chalky, melting away dissolving. Have you ever wondered where the worms gather to celebrate the first rain of the season? There's a hollow between the roots of huge oak tree, and the worms squirm and nibble their ways toward it when they hear drizzle tapping on the roof of the ground.
Reflection: This bar melted a little bit in my backpack and re-solidified, I think. The outer texture is more waxy, the body of it brittle all the way through, and I suspect the flavor is a little less vibrant than before, though I'm not sure.

Note: I just tasted three other chocolates before this one.
Nose: Sharp and wet, like a sponge. A little sweet. The pin prick feeling of the first cold raindrop on warm skin.
Mouth: Sweet. Sour like hot and sour soup. Wow really strong "soup" association today for some reason. Chicken and barley? Also rocks. Definitely the surface of dusty rocks that were splattered with mud during a rain and have since dried. A hug from a hiker you met on the trail, friendly and long but you'll probably never see him again. The mud caked to the tread of your boots, which are resting on a rock while you soak your feet in the stream.
Reflection: It's always interesting when something totally new pops up with this one. It was so much like the scent of soup for a moment there that I checked around me to see whether a bowl of actual soup was nearby.

Nose: Dark, black velvet, brown. Dark green like pine needles. The silence that comes after a flood.
Mouth: Sharp dark, the serrated blade edge of a rex begonia leaf. Quiet insidious assassin. Calm patient focused intent watching. The waxy feel of wet lichen. A hand holding the baby newt found beneath the stone.
Reflection: It really feels very much like my different moods cause me to rotate the chocolate and see new parts of it. I've had a rough day with a lot of loud and unpleasant emotion. I recognize some of what I saw today, things that in other moods I've interpreted as serene and peaceful. Today I saw ways that "serene" isn't the whole story, or the only possible interpretation.

Nose: It's interesting how there's kind of a swamp smell from a whole two feet away. Up close: Something intimate. Like the scent of a woman's neck that you catch while dancing with her. A damp, earthy, somewhat sour smell. A distant storm rolling in.
Mouth: The satisfying spreading-across-my-mouth feel of a dark beautiful forest swamp night. A night fairy, dark elf, tiny water drow with wings. Collecting mold from the underside of bark to use in potions.
Reflection: Huh, it seems like the sour perception has largely retreated. Can I still find it? Yeah, but it doesn't feel like "sour", it just feels like "sharp". There's the sharp edge of the hard bark, or the chill of the creek water, or the blade of a fairy's wing. It's not just not striking me as "sour" today. It's more like there's a bit of a bite, an edge, a harsh roughness. This experience was the closest one to my original experience of Ocumare that I've had in awhile.

Nose: Sour raspberry old penny vomit. Quiet church flutter. Tombs.
Mouth: Super duper metallic. Like my mouth has electric current running over it. A subtler deeper darkness behind that. Quiet and old. Something cool, a cool breeze of autumn flowing below, lifting a skirt, circling. Wet cave wall dripping.
Reflection: I have a bad headache and a lot of painful muscle tension today. I wonder if this chocolate tastes more sour to me when I'm more stressed. I wonder if it's cortisol. I wonder if I could measure my cortisol levels and find out how they correlate with my taste experiences.

Note: This is the first thing I'm eating this morning. Also, it's smoky outside.
Nose: Sweet and warm. A little sour. Quietly waiting.
Mouth: Smooth blooming electricity. Sweet. Washing. Somewhat chalky texture. The dry plants on the hill above the creek with serrated edges on their leaves. Dust on rocks.
Reflection: My brain doesn't seem to be open or active this morning. Things just aren't coming to me. Also, this bar has definitely gone through some melting.

Nose: Pungent earth. A sky overcast with sepia clouds. How do you get to the place where the well holds the kingdom of mushroom elves?
Mouth: A cloud of marijuana mist crawling along the ground. The dust kicked up behind the trotting hooves of a magical elk. A gathering in the caves deep in the earth, where worms weave baskets.
Reflection: It's interesting how I'm sometimes fixated on sourness, and sometimes not. I think of the overall character of this chocolate as "earthy", but the sourness is not earthy at all, and sometimes that's almost all I can taste.

Note: This is an audio transcript of a conversation in which Duncan interviewed me about the chocolate as I tasted it.

Logan: So I'm going to smell and taste this chocolate, and you're going to ask me questions about it. They can be any questions you want. This is Amano Ocumare Village.
Duncan: I'm curious if there are colors in the smells that you're smelling.
Logan: Yeah. Orange and green come to mind.
Duncan: I'm also curious if there's, like, a genre of music or something?
Logan: Hmmmm. Uh, yeah... I don't know what it's called. I have one song of it in my playlist for taking a bath. It has, like... bummmmm sounds, and bumm bumm bubbly things.
Duncan: And it's like kinda slow?
Logan: Yeah, it's slow, and it's kinda round notes, pretty simple instrumentation but I think kind of electronic. It's relaxing and grounded.
Duncan: Nice. I am also curious, because this is one that I'm bad at, whether you smell any, like, foods in this chocolate.
Logan: Maybe a little bit of caramel, it's quite earthy though, not like... maybe kind of coffee? But not really it's mostly... because coffee is also sometimes earthy. It's not a very foody chocolate, I think. I can see maybe a little bit a cream, a little bit of caramel, not really a lot in the way of like fruit or flowers. But, if there were fruit I think it would be raspberry.
Duncan: K well technically this is a question. Are you willing to chew your first bite?
Logan: Um... well I just put it in my mouth. Should I chew or it or should I let it melt?
Duncan: I would like you to chew it, see what happens.
Logan: Ok! Doing so. Now what.
Duncan: What does it crumble like?
Logan: What does it crumble like? Um... It kind of... hm. It kind of mush-crunches. I think [some] previous bars of this exact chocolate, this Ocumare Village, that I've had, were more crumbly and chalky, and I think it was because they were melted. Like, they melted and resolidified. This one's texture is a little different. It's more... it's solid, uh, it doesn't... it's not brittle, but it's not like melty or dissolvey either.
Duncan: Do any ghosts come out when you crumble it? If so, what are they like?
Logan: Texture-wise?
Duncan: Well like, I often get a vapor, or an emanation, when I crumble, when I chew. There's like some puff of something, and I'm curious whether there was a puff of anything.
Logan: Oh! Interesting. I'm gonna... I'm gonna end up eating a fair bit of this chocolate I think. Uh, it's kind of... dusty. Yeah.
Duncan: Like almost a dryness? Dry gritty kind of dust? Or, what kind of dust?
Logan: Well, it's kind of like... like dust that has settled in an attic? Or on rocks.
Duncan: Oooooh.
Logan: Like dust that drifts through the sunbeams. But it's settled, it's not in the sunbeams.
Duncan: Do you get any stories out of the chewed version?
Logan: I wanna melt one. ...Stories, um... It seems like that takes a different mental motion than what I'm engaging in by talking with you. Like, when stories just appear, I've listened differently.
Duncan: What about weather?
Logan: Weather! Um... Hm. Yeah, this is sort of cloudy, like maybe it almost wants to storm but it's not there yet? Heavy clouds, more than overcast.
Duncan: If this chocolate were medicine for someone, like to fix their problem or fill a hole in their life, who would this medicine be for?
Logan: I think that I kind of don't like people for whom this would be medicine, and so I don't know very many of them. The first person I thought of was Eli, and it's not quite right. I mean he might be kind of, of the people I know, the best answer to this? But like, I think this is more... this is more chocolate for... oh, maybe Oliver! It's chocolate for like, people who are kind of stuck in their heads in abstract land all of the time. And like don't know that they have bodies or live in the world. It's a really grounded chocolate. ...Are you satisfied?
Duncan: I was just checking, to see if I had anything left. I think I feel satisfied on asking questions, but I don't wanna be done. Are there other things that you can say, just out of your own heart?
Logan: Ok, um... I feel really fond of this chocolate. It kinda feels like an older friend who, like a much older friend, who gardens and lives in the woods, and just knows a lot of stuff that I don't know but is very down to earth about it, doesn't lecture and stuff and is just actually my peer. Um... And I feel like, really comfortable... they remind me of my friend Raymond, actually! Or my Mom's friend Raymond? I don't know, I haven't talked to him in a really long time. It was his birthday yesterday. And one of my favorite memories is when we were... Mom and I went over to his house, and we canned tomatoes from his garden, which I had never done before, and all the little lids went "pop pop pop". And his house made no noise. I guess he didn't have an air conditioner or something, and that was new to me. And it reminds me of him.
Duncan: Oh, the last question that I meant to ask and forgot was: Is this the same chocolate as the chocolate you've been eating all month?
Logan: ...Yes? I'm not sure I understand your question, though.
Duncan: Like... Can you feel, in your tasting of it, that it is the same guy?
Logan: Absolutely. I think the times when I was mainly just tasting the sourness, that felt like a very different chocolate. That sometimes felt almost like it was made by VIderi instead of Amano. But, this one feels like, I don't know, my earlier conceptions of Ocumare Village.
Duncan: Nice. Thanks.

Nose: Felt such a sense of relief when I smelled this today. It's like it's filling me with calm and life. It's sweet round calm, like cool water flowing.
Mouth: I just put it on my tongue and didn't even suck on it, which I've never tried before. The flavor is a lot less complex while I'm doing this. It's mainly just sharp, like touching a penny to your tongue. A lot more stuff washes over me when I roll it around in my mouth and suck on it. Sharp earth, like dry dirt beneath the grass. "Calm and alive" is a pretty good description of this. Alert and at peace at the same time. It's a little astringent. Astringent and also wet. Warm and also cool. There's so much contrast in this chocolate.

Note: I let the chocolate melt completely in the sun. I'm tasting it while it's melted.
Nose: Smells warm and a little smoky. I don't know how much of what I'm experiencing is the chocolate vs the exceptionally tranquil environment of my deck. The literal sounds I'm hearing are the creek, birds, cicadas, and my wind chime. But focusing on the chocolate: If I drop through this smell down a hole, what's on the other side? I emerge waist deep in a cool creek on a hot day, sitting in the water trailing my fingers through the ripples.
Mouth: Wow it's so warm and red. A sharp roundness washes over my mouth. It's cool and sweet for less than half a second, then there's a sour warmth that reminds me of direct sunlight on my skin. When I really fill my mouth with it, there's something larger, cool sweetness emerging like an elephant through the trees. Almost like a storm, but one that comes on gently, a wave of rain moving through the forest. Raspberry and earth, mycelia bathing in the seeped rain becoming plump and vibrant. Riding in waggon pulled by a tractor, sitting on square hay bales. Life, depth, and groundedness, joy.
Reflection: I really like this melted delivery method! It's like hot chocolate in the way it washes all through my mouth and throat, but unlike drinking chocolate, it adheres to the inside of my mouth, coating things, sticking around long enough to be properly heard. Something about the slow development is lost, compared to eating solid chocolate, so I wouldn't want this to be my default way of tasting most chocolates. But there's also a brightness and all-at-onceness that's added, and it's really lovely. Also, the prompt I used, "If I drop through this experience down a hole, what's on the other side?", might turn out to be a new favorite.

Nose: There's kind of a harshness. And a sweetness. I see white puffy clouds in the sky, drawn by a middle schooler, with pink outlines and a yellow glow behind.
Mouth: A jungly lushness. A jaguar stalking along a riverbank in the rain, mud gathering on the fur of its paws. It cleans the fur once the mud has dried. The long journey a raindrop take from the sky to kiss the face of a dry dusty rock.
Reflection: If my memory's correct, one of the most consistent things about this chocolate has been contrast. Today the contrast seems to show up as wet and dry. I wonder if the way I reconcile the contrasts, the way I weave them together, is present in the chocolate itself. I suspect so, because I think I've sometimes described chocolates as jarring, imbalanced, or non-integrated. This chocolate holds its contrasts in balanced tension.

Nose: Warm and round. Brown and red. Walking down a dusty road brushing my hand along the tall dry grasses topped with rough seed pods.
Mouth: A gummy texture. Sharp slicing through, cutting away a superficial layer. Beneath is something wide and still, a pond on a moonless night. Quiet of the water, but also a drama plays out under the surface, a fast predatory fish hunting with sharp teeth.
Reflection: Sharpness and fastness are especially apparent today. I wonder if it's because I'm anxious about traveling.

Logan Strohl