Untold Depths

It never ceases to amaze me how deep people can go when they're passionate about a topic. Any topic. I've been in a heated discussion with a semi-pro bowler on how much oil patterns on lanes matter. Prior to that conversation, I had never thought about the care and maintenance that goes into bowling lanes.

YouTube makes this easy. On almost any topic you can think of, someone has made a video series on it that goes into way more detail than most of us ever consider. Listening to someone that is truly passionate about a topic is always a rewarding experience. YouTube can have a difficult time suggesting new videos to me because of this. I recently binged videos on painting canvases, early Christian writing, and traffic light designs impacts on car accident. I'm not a painter, nor a religious scholar, nor a city planner.

So while I was thinking of what should replace Some More S'Mores, I stumbled down a rabbit hole of videos from chocolateers, articles on the history of cacao in the Aztec empire, and finally on someone that had plotted out sensory diagrams on all cacao varieties and had opened his own shop to source and sell nibs.

Indian nibs really stood out to me. They lean heavily towards berry and fruit notes and notsomuch on nutty/earthy. Much as with bowling or painting, before finding this guy, I had no idea cacao had this kind of depth and variety. I didn't know India grew nibs, let alone that they taste quite different from Mexican nibs. So there aren't just "cacao nibs" in this beer - there are organic cacao nibs sourced fair trade from a farm in the Idukki Hills of India. Maybe this will become a series like 80 East where we explore different nib growing regions.