How to host a candy tasting for adults

The mistake most people make with a candy tasting is starting with the biggest, darkest, loudest thing on the table. Twenty minutes later everything tastes like that one candy, and the delicate ones are wasted. The fix is simple: order the candies the way you would order tea or cheese, from quiet to loud, and give people something neutral between each one.

Step one: set the order

Light and bright first, dark and complex last. If you are tasting our six, this order works well:

1. Glass Garden — pear and violet, the quietest of the six.
2. Snowline Sherbet — lemon cream with star anise at the back.
3. Paper Lantern — raspberry and pink peppercorn.
4. Copper Comet — blood orange and smoked vanilla.
5. Midnight Orchard — black currant and burnt honey.
6. The Quiet Bee — honey and toasted fennel, the darkest and the one that stays with you.

Step two: set the table

You need less than you think. A plate per person (or a paper napkin, but a plate reads better), a glass of still water each, plain crackers or a small piece of bread, and something to spit into if you are being serious about it. Candy is sweet enough that swallowing six of them will flatten your palate faster than wine will.

Put the candy out in small pieces rather than whole lollipops. Ask the shop to break one of each into quarters if you are hosting, or do it yourself with the back of a knife on a board. A quarter of a lollipop is plenty to judge it; a whole one is a snack.

Step three: how to actually taste

Give people this three-line instruction and then leave them alone:

• Look at it first. Note the colour and the layers before anything goes in your mouth.
• Hold it in your mouth without biting for about ten seconds. Most of the flavour in hard candy is released by dissolving, not chewing, and the second wave of flavour usually arrives at twenty or thirty seconds.
• Then bite. The texture change is part of the candy, and the way it breaks tells you as much as the first taste did.

Step four: give people words

Most adults freeze when asked to describe a flavour. A short vocabulary list on the table loosens everything up. Ours, roughly in the order we use it:

• Fruit: dark, bright, dried, jammy, peel, cooked.
• Sweet: honey, caramel, brown sugar, clean, syrupy, sharp.
• Other: floral, herbal, toasted, smoky, peppery, cooling, bitter at the end.
• Texture: glassy, satin, chalky, sticky, soft bite, hard bite.

Ask for one word per candy from each person, going round the table. It takes two minutes and it is usually the funniest part of the evening.

Pairings that work

You do not need to pair anything, but if you want to, keep it plain and unsweet. Black coffee with Midnight Orchard. A dry sparkling water with Snowline Sherbet. A sharp cheddar with The Quiet Bee, which sounds like a mistake and is not. Paper Lantern is better with nothing at all.

Nobody remembers the fourth candy. Order matters more than quantity, which is a good argument for buying fewer things and buying them well.

If you want to run the tasting with our candy, a mixed box is the simplest way to do it — send us a request and tell us the date and how many people, and we will suggest a box that fits. For more on storing whatever is left over, see our storage guide.