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Comment by ehnto | Hacker News Reader

Are you from the US by chance?

I only ask because specifically for chocolate and coffee, I would consider the US baseline to be exceedingly average, even terrible. Even "okay" chocolate and coffee from other countries better known for food will blow it out of the water.

The US does do excellent coffee, and excellent chocolate, but you have to seek it out. In a country like Italy or Australia the default, okay stuff is better. If an Australian couldn't tell the difference between good and great coffee I'd see why.

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This is definitely the main issue in the US. People are always clamoring for the cheapest thing that's good enough. The US has some of the best coffees, chocolates, beers, food, and more in the world. I mean, if you wanna make money, you sell to Americans.

But they're all artisanal products that few access. The baseline Starbucks, Hershey's, Budweiser, TGI Fridays, etc. are all... so bad.

First time I had Valrhona chocolate I was actually furious because I felt I had been cheated my whole life...

I don't know that brand but this exactly haha

Hershey's standard milk chocolate bothers me (and many others) because of the spoiled milk/butyric acid smell, which is due to their original manufacturing process.

However, some people in the US enjoy Hershey's, are not sensitive to the smell, and want the chocolate they grew up with (they might also like the acidic/tangy taste.)

But certain varieties of Hershey chocolate (Symphony, Special Dark) do not bother me as much.

Yep. nailed it. I agree that at least to my limited vacation experiences, it's not true in say Italy that 99% of chocolate products are garbage.

Some of the American chocolate for high volume candy bars is very waxy and not very chocolatey.

For example, compare the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to Trader Joe's peanut butter cups [0]. It may be that the Reese's ones used to use better chocolate or it may be that my tastes changed as I grew up. But I used to love them as kids and now they taste off. Similarly for Twix etc.

[0] I'm sure other stores sell peanut butter cups too. There's nothing special about the Trader Joe's ones other than they are mass produced and use better chocolate that Reese's.

EDIT: Flavor change may be due to cost-saving measures like replacing cocoa butter with vegetable oil https://www.today.com/food/chocoholics-sour-new-hersheys-for...

Most chocolate things, like random chocolate cookies or commercial cake etc, breakfast cereal, irritate the back of my throat in a mild way. Couple that with the foreground taste not being anything special, and it's just enough to make the whole experience just the wrong side of neutral. Not terrible just not good either.

All stuff that's made in factories and needs to have shelf life, so I can only imagine it's any number of cost saving substitutions and preservatives and who knows what all for other reasons like preserving texture etc.

> Most chocolate things, like random chocolate cookies or commercial cake etc, breakfast cereal, irritate the back of my throat in a mild way.

This happens to me too; I thought it was universal. I actually like it, though, for some reason (I guess the association with chocolate).

That would be the butyric acid.

It's what gives US chocolate the "vomit/bile" taste uncommon in other chocolate. I am guessing it becomes acquired or unnoticeable taste for people who eat it a lot but man is it a shock if you usually eat chocolate without it!

I have no idea why they use it, but I can think of one really good reason why they shouldn't, your product probably shouldn't have "hints of vomit" in its flavour profile.

I mean it's also in cheese. People just aren't used to the weird tang, and I don't blame them. I can tolerate it but Hershey's isn't exactly my favorite haha

I look at products like Hershey's chocolate or Reeses more like their own category of processed food, kind of like Spam. They have a close, but not exact resemblance to "normal" chocolate or peanut butter, but they're also sort of an acquired taste, and I think their customers would be upset if Reese's Peanut Butter cups suddenly tasted like the Trader Joe's versions (with real peanut butter instead of a mysterious chalky peanut-flavored substance), or if Hershey's stopped using the butyric acid process that makes them taste like vomit to non-americans.

Coffee in Europe is still a majority of cheap, overoasted blends.

Nespresso is barely any better.

Same for a majority of local roasters.

And people expect this type of taste:(

There's an enormous difference between supermarket crap (or whatever it is that you think Nespresso is barely better than, because that would be the first thing I think of for crap coffee) and 'local roasters', however overly you think they're roasting.

I get all mine from Pact, by no means particularly artisan or expensive, and yeah a light roast is not my favourite. But whole beans freshly roasted and ground makes an entirely different drink to freeze-dried instant Nescafe or whatever, or supermarket beans ok the shelf for months, flavoured with cinnamon or vanilla or something to hide the stale.

These will give you an idea of beans we find in supermarket, several of these brands are considered as local roasters, I can even find Boreal in supermarket, which would be your typical "new wave coffee bar/beans" https://www.galaxus.ch/en/s7/producttype/coffee-beans-183

Given that, Switzerland is a bit special for this matter I believe, but I know that most people will be happy with Nespresso.

I rarely see anyone drinking instant coffee. On that subject, I rather drink some "expensive" instant coffee (yes I have seen single origin instant coffee) than Nespresso or Nescafé.

My point is drinking good coffee is a luxe.

My go to for "supermarket" coffee is Illy (red)

Give any child, anywhere in the world, standard Hershey's chocolate and they are going to lose their mind if it's the first time they have tasted chocolate.

Is there any place on earth that has good coffee? Italy's coffee is horrible, even if they have quality machines to make it with. 99% of people will use "ille" or whatever that brand is, which is far worse than starbucks worst roast. Meanwhile I can wander down the street in the US and find better sourced and roasted beans than I could find anywhere in europe.

>Meanwhile I can wander down the street in the US and find better sourced and roasted beans than I could find anywhere in europe.

You must know the place you live very well, I was excited to try coffee in New York when I lived in Manhattan given it was essentially responsible for popularising the current trend in western coffee culture. I had many local coffee snobs directing me to places all over the city and I found only a single shop that I could bear, even then it would've been average to poor in London or Berlin, and worse still in my colleague's native Melbourne.

Blue Bottle was the biggest let down of all, since at the time it was hyped to all hell.

Perhaps europeans are simply used to burnt coffee

the opposite, the ubiquity of burnt mud in every office coffee warmer seems to have dulled the American palate, that or the over abundance of artificial ingredients in everything, to the extent that they simply cannot discern what good coffee is, because it's either that or coffee that looks like the water from a particularly detail oriented miniature painting session; scant colour, scant aroma.

I will admit of course that the French seem to enjoy charcoal, and when in my teens I worked as at a shop the beans that were left too long in the roaster were usually marked as "French Roast"

Best coffee I have ever had was in Vietnam... but that's robusta beans (which tend to be bitter) and they use a lot of condensed sweetened milk.

https://www.seriouseats.com/vietnamese-coffee-recipe-1177539...

Anecdotally, Australia and Melbourne does it pretty well. And obviously there is good coffee in every American city, you just need to know where to go.

idk man, I would say the opposite but I tended to avoid the Illy shops because I already knew I didn't care for that brand much.

Right here in NJ a shop a block away from me had it as their distinguishing feature and I didn't like it much (still better than sbux though). And then when I go on vacation in Italy and other European countries I see Illy mostly in vending machines, so when I see and Illy shop I'm not tempted, when there are 500 other more interesting looking shops every direction you look. And in all of those, I mostly had a lot of cappucinos, and they were basically all excellent.

I cannot call Italy's coffe bad. But I confess I never drink it perfectly straight. Usually cappucino. The European style, a pretty small and strong espresso that is foamed. Not a honking big american cup.

I mean, Australia the default is decent espresso. Even our petrol stations do decent espresso, it is overroasted for sure, but it's not pot coffee either.

But we have the Italians to thank for that, and Australian cafe culture is why it's so easy to get a good coffee even without trying.

The entire world has awful chocolate, except for Europe. And Europe doesn't even produce cocoa beans. It's ridiculous.

Somehow I grew up with the expectation that coffee in US is exceptional everywhere. I guess from movies, pop culture - just how much coffee is part of American daily life.

Then later in life, when I traveled to US as an independent adult (after EU coffee culture upbringing), for work, and embraced the local coffee culture... I had a big disassociation between what my mind thought about how coffee in US should be and what it actually was.

I realized that majority of positive feedback about coffee drinks was based on all those other things people put into coffee...syrups, chocolate, marshmallows, cinnamon, milk, etc. Etc.

While the most basic espresso was... Vile:(

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