For Chocolate Week 2009,   Seventypercent.com focuses on fine chocolate made in countries that grow cacao, on new weird an wonderful drink, food and chocolate matches and also announces its new Origin Chocolate Destination partnership with a boutique hotel in Ilfracombe.

Most chocolate we eat is made in the developed world from commodity beans grown in the tropics. Now cacao producing countries are fighting back, and in a series of tastings with Melt Chocolates of Notting Hill, Seventypercent will feature Pacari from Ecuador and Santander from Colombia in Chocolate Week.

Wine, rum, beer – they’ve all been matched with chocolate, but how far can you go? Seventypercent takes things to the limits with some amazing results in a joint fine chocolate and farmhouse cheese matching with South Kensington cheese emporium La Cave à Fromage.

Fine chocolate in the UK can be a bit London biased, so in a mission to take the origin chocolate message all around the UK, Seventypercent are announcing in Chocolate Week a new partnership with family-friendly Ilfracombe boutique hotel, The Elmfield. Offering gourmet standard food, The Elmfield is an excellent location to start our first Origin Chocolate Destination, with sampling and menu specials during Chocolate Week and our first Origin Chocolate Weekend coming soon.

Taste of Chocolate

Taste of Chocolate is our new series of tasting events bringing a whole new approach to the art of chocolate appreciation.

Fine chocolate is fast becoming as sophisticated as wine, yet we are conditioned to eat chocolate as a sweet snack with little chance of noticing its finer points.

These new events will help to unravel all those years of chocolate snacking by working through each of our chocolate senses one by one.

Rather than tell you what chocolate you should like, Taste of Chocolate gives you the tools to start you on your own journey towards becoming a chocolate connoisseur.

Through our courses and workshops we explore the gastranomic senses with a series of interactive modules, awakening and educating our palates along the way.

Two hour starter course

Our two hour starter course is suitable for beginners and connoisseurs alike. Using fun and engaging games and taste experiments we will awaken your chocolate senses.

We’ll take you through the basics of tasting chocolate and leave you with some simple steps that will allow you to quickly tell a good chocolate from a bad one and set you well on the way to becoming a connoisseur.

Info

Book your tickets through PayPal – no account needed, all major cards accepted.

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7.30pm-9.30pm, Thurs 16 Mar 2010
The Scotch Malt Whisky Society
London Members’ Rooms
19 Greville Street
London
EC1N 8SQ

Taste of Chocolate

Special date as part of The Chocolate Festival, Brighton and Brighton & Hove Food and Drink Festival.

Taste of Chocolate is our new series of tasting events bringing a whole new approach to the art of chocolate appreciation.

Fine chocolate is fast becoming as sophisticated as wine, yet we are conditioned to eat chocolate as a sweet snack with little chance of noticing its finer points. These new events will help to unravel all those years of chocolate snacking by working through each of our chocolate senses one by one.

Rather than tell you what chocolate you should like, Taste of Chocolate gives you the tools to start you on your own journey towards becoming a chocolate connoisseur.

Through our courses and workshops we explore the gastranomic senses with a series of interactive modules, awakening and educating our palates along the way.

Three hour starter course

Our extended three hour starter course is suitable for beginners and connoisseurs alike.  Using fun and engaging games and taste experiments we will awaken your chocolate senses.

We’ll take you through the basics of tasting chocolate and leave you with some simple steps that will allow you to quickly tell a good chocolate from a bad one and set you well on the way to becoming a connoisseur.

Info

Book your tickets through PayPal – no account needed, all major cards accepted.

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7.30pm-9.30pm, Sun 21 Mar 2010
myhotel brighton
17 Jubilee Street
Brighton
BN1 1GE
EC1N 8SQ

Chocolate making stages

The Connoisseurs Club is our new series of fine chocolate appreciation sessions for more advanced chocolate enthusiasts. These new events will give you a chance to share your passion for fine and origin chocolate with fellow enthusiasts and guests such as our official reviewers or industry specialists.

The event will be led by Seventypercent, the format though will be more informal than our regular tastings. We will be providing a selection of the best and most interesting chocolate at each event, but you will also be welcome to bring along any samples you have found for group discussion and tasting – no matter the quality.

Connoisseurs Club tastings will be a chance to try some of the latest samples from new and established chocolate makers – including works in progress, source ingredients like cacao, and will be an opportunity to experience the weird and wonderful in fine chocolate.

While beginners are welcome, we will be giving only the briefest of introductions into how to taste chocolate and will be going straight into tasting and comparing this month’s samples. As usual, there will also be a chance for a whisky and chocolate match at the end of the event.

(Please note: if you are bringing your own samples along for the event, please ensure they are fit for retail consumption and commercially available, unless otherwise agreed in advance. In general, unflavoured dark bars will be of the most interest).

Info

Book your tickets through PayPal – no account needed, all major cards accepted.

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7.30pm-9.30pm, Thurs 20 Apr 2010
The Scotch Malt Whisky Society
London Members’ Rooms
19 Greville Street
London
EC1N 8SQ

Art Pollard in a cacao plantation

Art Pollard of Amano

In a specially arranged last minute event, Art Pollard – the chocolate maker behind award winning US chocolate maker Amano – will be our featured guest at our February tasting.

Art will explain the philosophy of this new US chocolate maker, and will tell us how Amano went from kitchen samples to leading fine chocolate maker in just three years.

Amano already make one of the widest ranges of origin bars, and Art will take us through sampling their growing range of dark and milk chocolate and tell us about the sources of Amano’s cacao.

As usual, we’ll finish off with an optional dram of whisky with matching chocolate, or you can just stay around and chat with fellow chocolate enthusiasts.

Limited places are available for this short-notice event, so book your tickets soon. Price includes a free bar of Amano dark or milk chocolate to take away, worth £8.

Info

Book your tickets through PayPal – no account needed, all major cards accepted.

7.30pm-9.30pm, Thurs 11 Feb 2010
The Scotch Malt Whisky Society
London Members’ Rooms
19 Greville Street
London
EC1N 8SQ

John Scharffenberger

The Academy of Chocolate presents:

An audience with John Scharffenberger

John Sharffenberger is paying one of his rare visits to London so this is a unique opportunity to meet him.

John Sharffenberger, together with his partner Robert Steinberg founded one of America’s first ‘artisan’ chocolate makers back in the early Nineties.

John started his professional life as a Californian wine maker and while Robert’s expertise was in medicine – a perfect combination to produce chocolate!

The Scharffen Berger chocolate company started in a ‘garage’ and concentrated on using cocoa beans from selected South American cocoa plantations that John developed with the ‘campesinos’.

In 2006 Hershey bought Scharffen Berger chocolate. Now John travels the cocoa growing world working with farmers to improve their stocks, their environments and their livelihoods.

Info

6.30PM WEDNESDAY 27TH JANUARY 2010

THE ARTS CLUB
40 Dover Street
London
W1S 4NP

TICKETS: £25

How to book:

Download and complete the attached booking form and return with a cheque to:

Academy of Chocolate, 53 Cavendish Road, London SW12 0BL

Cheques should be made payable to: ‘Academy of Chocolate’.

PLEASE NOTE: This event is run by the Academy of Chocolate, which has no commercial connection with Seventypercent.com. We’re just listing it to promote this great event.

Chocolate making stages

Our regular monthly tasting event, with an introduction to fine chocolate and sampling of some of the latest fine and origin chocolate we’ve found, plus occasional special guests and featured products.

Read more about our monthly tasting events here.

The formal part of the tasting will be followed by an optional dram of whisky with matching chocolate, or you can just stay around and chat with fellow chocolate enthusiasts.

Info

Book your tickets through PayPal – no account needed, all major cards accepted.

Please bring a copy of your PayPal receipt to the event as your ticket.

London's Southbank in unusual winter snow

After the success of the first festival at London’s Southbank Centre in Easter this year, The Chocolate Festival is back for Christmas and Seventypercent.com will be there to launch a new taste mapping system for chocolate.

The Chocolate Festival is unique in London chocolate events, bringing a great range chocolate talks, demos and exhibitors all free, behind the Royal Festival Hall at the Southbank.

Though not specifically a fine chocolate event, some of the UK’s top chocolatiers will be there, including William Curley, Paul Wayne Gregory, Rococo and water-based ganache wizz, Damian Allsop.

Meanwhile, other London fine choc stars such as Paul A Young will be in the demo area, in Paul’s case a guided tasting and signing copies of his new book.

Other highlights will be talks by Thierry Castel of Valrhona UK telling us about the origins their chocolate and Damian Allsop with his ultimate chocolate mousse.

Seventypercent will be there at 12pm on Saturday telling you how to be a chocolate connoisseur in three easy steps – we’re looking forward to getting the answer to that!

Take the taste test for our new Chocolate Taste Map

2:oopm – 5:00pm Sat 12 Dec, Level 2 Foyers, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London

Seventypercent.com has been running for almost ten years now, but in all that time, we’ve never found a map or diagram that adequately conveys the range flavour notes found in chocolate. The wheels and ’spider-webs’ that are around have been adapted from wine tasting and are an uneasy match.

So we thought it was about time we developed our own system, based on theoretical work by our most prolific bar reviewer, Alex Rast.

To give this new system a solid basis, we’re collecting data from members of the public, so come along to our stand in the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday 12 Dec and take our 5-minute taste test.

Info

The Chocolate Festival
11-13 December 2009

Southbank Centre Square (behind the Royal Festival Hall)
Belvedere Road
London
SE1 8XX

Admission free

Chocolate making stages

Our regular monthly tasting event, with an introduction to fine chocolate and sampling of some of the latest fine and origin chocolate we’ve found, plus occasional special guests and featured products.

Christmas special

For our special Christmas edition, we’ll be featuring some extra goodies, treats and as usual the weird and wonderful.

Read more about our monthly tasting events here.

The formal part of the tasting will be followed by an optional dram of whisky with matching chocolate, or you can just stay around and chat with fellow chocolate enthusiasts.

Info

Book your tickets through PayPal – no account needed, all major cards accepted.

Please bring a copy of your PayPal receipt to the event as your ticket.

Clay Gordon runs US chocolate website and social network “The Chocolate Life” (the US equivalent of Seventypercent and with whom we share many members). Clay is an authority on fine chocolate in the US and author of “Discover Chocolate”.

Clay will be giving us an overview of the US chocolate scene and introduce some of the new breed of American chocolate makers – some already known in the UK, and some very new.

Info

6.30pm Thursday 22nd October 2009

The Arts Club
40 Dover Street
London
W1S 4NO

TICKETS: £20

HOW TO BOOK:

Complete the booking form below and return with a cheque to:

Academy of Chocolate, 53 Cavendish Road, London SW12 0BL

Cheques should be made payable to: ‘Academy of Chocolate’

Clay Gordon Presents to the AoC 22.10.09