Before the Judging Can Begin | #PSC 217
OVERVIEW: Episode 217 of #PodSaveChocolate takes a look at typology, classification, and taxonomy – and how the lack of a formal, consistent, and defensible vocabulary is a gaping hole in how chocolate is taught and judged. Then ... what can be done to address the challenges?
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Episode 217
In PSC episode 215#, I explored the What, the Why, and the How of evaluating chocolate, using as examples current tools for describing flavor.
Clay Gordon
In this episode I am going to go on a journey through some of the history of other judging systems and how they evolved.
My first question is: “Should flavor be the linchpin of the classification, education, and judging?“
Taste, aroma, and flavor are interconnected sensory experiences. Taste refers to the sensations detected on the tongue (e.g., sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami). Aroma involves the scents perceived in the nose. Flavor is the experience that combines both taste and aroma.
Flavor has always been assumed to be the appropriate starting point; it’s never been questioned to the best of my knowledge. But, what are the implications of starting from a different place and proceeding toward different goals?
Where to Begin?
I begin at a familiar place to those who are familiar with past arguments I make: Language.
- Typology is conceptual and deductive: reasoning from principles to categories. The categories are ideal types; nothing in the world instantiates them perfectly.
- Classification is operational: the act of putting a real object into a bin, and it carries obligations a typology doesn’t: exhaustiveness (every entry has to land somewhere), decidability (a judge must resolve it in seconds, from the object in front of them), and (usually) exclusivity (an object can exist in only one bin).
- Taxonomy is empirical and inductive: categories abstracted from observed cases. Categories that Accrete over time, which is exactly why they seem forced or out of place, they weren’t derived, they grew.
English lets classification be both the act of sorting and the resulting scheme, and it’s easy to equivocate between the usages without noticing. Typology doesn't have that problem, it’s only ever a product, never an act.
But here’s the problem for competition judging that this language distinction reveals: classification pressure.
A competition must place every entry in exactly one bin. That requirement deforms a typology, because the fastest way to guarantee exhaustiveness is to promote whatever distinguishes an awkward entry (milk type, geography, smoke, genetics, whatever) up to sit beside base identity.
A good system isn’t one that keeps its axes clean, it’s one that does its typology first and derives the classification from it, rather than letting the bin-assignment process (re-)write the categories.
Three More Considerations
- The residual bin. Somewhere there’s a category that means “everything that didn’t fit.” A typology never needs a residual bin. Empty cells are fine, and so are unclassified objects. A competition classification system acquires [a residual bin] the moment entry fees stop being refundable.
- The promotion. A modifier gets raised to identity rank because a flight needed it. Nobody decides this; they accumulate.
- Extrinsic axes. Categories based on a property of the market rather than a property of the object; these axes can’t even pretend to be typology.
What Does All That Mean For Chocolate?
Over the past year or three, I have been exploring classification systems for beer, wine, spirits, coffee, balsamic vinegar, cheese, and chocolate to understand:
- Where they started and how they evolved
- How they are the same and how they differ
- How they influence education and certification
- How they influence evaluation and competition judging
Beer
The Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) guidelines say plainly that they’re written for competition, not as a beer encyclopedia. (Jackson’s World Guide to Beer (1977) was narrative and descriptive. Fred Eckhardt’s Essentials of Beer Style (1989) sat in between, converting Jackson's prose into a more systematic catalog. BJCP came last, adding full numeric rigor.)
But look at some edge case examples. Category 34C, Experimental Beer, is a residual bin where entries that don’t match the criteria for other categories are assigned. Category 27, Historical Beer (e.g., a gruit/grut/gruyt beer), exists because those beers don’t get entered often enough to warrant unique category names.
Entry volume is deciding category structure. That's not conceptual work; that's letting competition logistics lead the way.
BJCP categories
- Standard American Beer
- International Lager
- Czech Lager
- Pale Malty European Lager
- Pale Bitter European Beer
Wine
Major wine competitions don’t always flight by appellation. Sometimes, they flight by variety and price bracket. Price is an extrinsic property of what’s in the glass. It’s used because a $14 Cabernet can’t fairly meet a $250 one (which does not mean the comparison is not useful for educational purposes; it just might not make sense in a competition), and no amount of typology fixes that, only a bin does.
It’s the purest example of an axis with zero typological standing surviving because judging requires it.
Wine treats sweetness as the classic cross-cutting style. Wine’s other axes – color, still/sparkling/fortified, varietal, and appellation – behave more like separate classification dimensions than a clean category/subcategory pairs. Classification turms on: place of origin, vinification method, sweetness, vintage, and grape variety all at once, and practices vary by country.
Spirits
“New Western” (aka “Contemporary”) gin is a category defined by absence, juniper isn't dominant. The TTB doesn't recognize it. It exists because judges needed somewhere to put brands like Hendrick’s and Aviation who could not compete against brands like Tanqueray on a juniper-forwardness criterion that Hendrick’s and Aviation were never reaching for.
New Western is a negative category, born at the judging table, later rationalized backward into a style with a story attached.
Cheese (2025 ACS Judging & Competition categories)
- Fresh Unripened Cheeses
- Soft-Ripened Cheeses
- American Originals
- American Made / International Style
- Cheddars
The American Cheese Society’s competition rules explicitly pull two attributes out of the base categories and give them their own separate categories: cheeses with any added flavors and smoked cheeses are excluded from the standard entry categories and redirected to their own dedicated categories. “Smoked” and “flavored” aren’t types of cheese, they're modifiers that could apply to a fresh cheese, a semi-soft, or a hard one.
TL;DR
A clean typology doesn’t eliminate classification pressure.
It just gives us somewhere defensible to put something that does not easily into an existing category in a classification system and lets us name the residual bin as a residual bin instead of dressing it up as a top-level identity.
Making the Connections To Chocolate
In the previous What, Why, How episode, I asked if flavor assessment should be the primary (first) entry point for assessing chocolate. It’s important, yes, but is it the most important? Through my work I have come to the conclusion that, as with many things about chocolate the answer is, “It depends.” And, in the case of flavor it depends on who the audience is.
Another important consideration is, “Is this a well-made example of the type and style of chocolate?” However, before we can answer that question we need to know what type and style a chocolate is. The assessment will always be subjective but at least is will now be compared to an agreed-upon standard.
Typologies, classifications, and taxonomies do not arise out of thin air.
However, most of ones that are currently in use have evolved more out of necessity to solve challenges associated with competition judging rather than:
- A systematic exploration of typology, or
- An understanding of how other beverages and foods have addressed the issues, where they have succeeded, and where they have failed.
Furthermore, their evolution (the addition of new categories, re-parenting subcategories) is most often driven by competition logistics rather than an intrinsic property.
Question: How does “Dark Milk” fit into a chocolate classification system? As a subset of Dark or a subset of Milk? The answer may seem obvious but each answer has deep implications for the rest of the system.
Along the same lines, where does “% cocoa content” fit? How does “2-ingredient” fit? Is “Single-origin” a type of chocolate, a style, or what? How is “Rustic” classified?
Competition categories like “Plain Origin Dark” conflate type, style, and provenance descriptor terms. Is this conflation across multiple categories consistently applied?
In Conclusion – The Next Steps
When I spun up chocophile.com in 2001, one of my premises was that chocolate needed a body of writing in the genre of literary criticism to help position it in respect to other beverages and foods that had extensive histories of writings on topics in appreciation and connoisseurship. I still think work needs to be done in this area, and I will continue to contribute my thoughts and I trust others will as well.
I now think it is more important for specialty chocolate to have a defensible encyclopedic classification system built from a carefully considered typological foundation that can be used to derive a classification system for competition judging, rather than let competition judging drive classificati0n without an underlying defensible philosophy.
In this episode, I have shared some of the work I have been doing building a defensible typology for chocolate as a foundation for a classification system that can be used for education and judging.
I am working on a new book that introduces the typology and the classification system, along with the research that led to their development. My hope is, once the book is published, that it will be discussed widely – and improved – eventually forming the foundation of a systematic approach to chocolate education, evaluation, and competition judging.
Future Episodes
IICCT deep dive
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