The Northwest Chocolate Festival/UnConference 2023 Days 0-1

Day 0

This chocolate tour was a rare one of those tours that span over many days. The Northwest Chocolate Festival and UnConference is a major chocolate event in which the best craft chocolate makers, bean sources, and equipment makers gather under one roof. This whole shebang was in Bellevue, Washington, so we flew there and arrived Wednesday night. The airport was in Seattle, which is very close to Bellevue, so we drove to the hotel, had a very nice pizza dinner, and went to sleep.

Day 1

Day one of the UnConference had begun, and we took a very short walk to the Meydenbauer Center after a quick breakfast at the hotel Starbucks. The first thing I noticed was the escalator. Undoubtedly the longest I had seen, it led up to another floor, which had two registration tables. The UnConference mostly consists of seminars, and there were rooms around the corner and past the tables.

The first forty-five minutes were spent preparing notes and meeting people. I met a man named Snooky, who told me he was a factory designer. He was very funny and made a lot of jokes about my dolphin. Also, among my first acquaintances was a woman named Anne, who is a cacao farmer and a lawyer. She has written a couple of books, one of which I recently read, and is writing a third. She also owns a cacao farm in Hawaii and has received a Cacao of Excellence award in 2019.

Once everyone was registered, Brian (the show producer of the UnConference) led us in an icebreaker where we split up into groups of three or four and discussed our goal for this UnConference. That was where I met Snooky and Anne. Then we broke up into different groups and discussed what we wanted to take away from this UnConference.

After that was a Chocolate Triangulation Taste Activity, in which we were given three plates of different chocolates and determined the bitterness, sweetness, and how many different cacao origins were represented in these chocolates. Then we compared our notes and saw the differences. Brian said that the differences were created because of our low or high tolerance for sweetness or bitterness. Then after that, the seminars began.

The first seminar I attended was Chocolate Quality Evaluation for Professionals. The speaker here was Chloe Doutre. We discussed how tasting chocolate can affect how the flavors are released, and we then tasted several different samples and talked about how each of then tasted wildly different just because of the difference in fermenting.

The next seminar came after lunch, but the one I was attending was not a seminar. It was titled Women in Chocolate Breakout Session. It was moderated by the social media director. We all gathered into small groups and talked about our separate goals in the chocolate industry. We wrote them down on sticky notes and put them up on the wall. Then we broke up into different small groups and discussed how we were going to get to these goals. Again, we wrote then down on sticky notes and put them up on the wall. Then we broke up into different small groups and discussed the steps we would take to reach our goals. Then we wrote them down on... you get the idea. We ended the day with another Chocolate Triangulation Taste Activity, and days 0-1 were completed.

Here is me, Anne, and Snooky. During the icebreaker at the start of the day, we met in a group, as fate would have it, and we automatically became good friends.

This is me outside of Room 404, waiting for this important seminar to begin. As you can just barely see, Dolphin is accompanying me to all of the seminars.

Here you can see me and Snooky tasting chocolate during the Chocolate Triangulation Taste Activity at the end of the day, as evidenced by the obvious lack of light outside. We are currently tasting, retasting, and re-retasting the third sample, trying to determine the dominant flavor.