Hot Chocolate Review

Introduction to Hot Chocolate

It clearly isn't a difficult proposition to recruit friends, colleagues and even total strangers into comparative taste tests of hot chocolate and hot cocoa. In researching this report, we found over 15 such tests, some comprising dozens of brands and panels of distinguished experts, and some amounting to a handful of hot cocoas sipped by one lonely yet diligent food blogger.

At the top of our All Reviews chart are publications that sample a large variety of brands using a rigorous methodology: Cook's Illustrated, Consumer Reports, Good Housekeeping and Real Simple. Although they don't all come to the same conclusions, these sources do a good job sampling hot chocolate and hot cocoa mixes in various price categories -- including both supermarket and gourmet brands.

After these top four sources, we included smaller magazines, newspapers and food enthusiast websites that conducted reasonably rigorous taste tests of hot chocolate mixes, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, SeriousEats.com and Food & Wine. Finally, we consulted a smattering of blogs -- such as TastingMenu.com and CandyAddict.com -- whose owners do a good job weighing the pros and cons of various hot chocolates and hot cocoas, either by themselves or with the help of friends.

Nestlé Hot Cocoa (*Est. $2 for 10 servings) is a widely available supermarket hot chocolate brand, and yet is not top-picked by even one of the 16 sources on our All Reviews chart. Cook's Illustrated criticizes Nestlé Rich Chocolate Hot Cocoa for its "overwhelming sweetness" and "powdery" aftertaste, while Boston.com's panel calls it "cloyingly sweet" and also complains of an aftertaste.