As of recently, I have been taking great enjoyment in the land chocolate milk. It has brought me a lot of joy and heartfelt moments with it during the winter time here in Anchorage. Anyone else have similar opinions on this? I would love to share thank you guys for reading this great article.
I drink a lot of chocolate milk. At some point I started writing down what I thought about each one, and over the last month that has turned into a website; and now there are 68 of them on it.
What set me off is that every rating system mashes "good" and "sweet" into one number. Those aren't the same thing. A milk can be genuinely well made and also far too sweet for you, and a single 5/10 hides both of those facts. So on mine the score only comes from flavor, mouthfeel, and aftertaste. Sweetness and chocolate intensity get written down as descriptors that aren't allowed to touch the score. You find out it's very sweet, and then it's your call whether that's a problem.
Which is also why the whole thing falls apart if it's just me. One guy rating 68 milks isn't a review site, it's a blog with extra steps. So most of what I've built is actually for other people. Anyone can add a milk, upload a photo, log a price, or mark which store actually carries it, and every score recalculates off all the reviews instead of being frozen at whatever I said in September. The store thing especially needs other people. I cannot tell you what's on the shelf in your city.
There's also a palate quiz. Five questions, 32 possible results, each one named. I'm a Hedonist. The quiz isn't the point though — the point is that once enough people have one, you can find the reviewers who taste things the way you do, and a 7 from someone with your palate means something that a 7 from a stranger doesn't.
I've gotten unreasonable about the rest of it too. I typed in 25 nutrition labels by hand (before adding an in-browser label scanner). There's a carrageenan-free page because I got curious one night. There's a high protein page where I decided 8g per 100ml is the cutoff, a number I picked myself that nobody asked for.
Where it's at: 68 milks, 59 brands, 68 reviews. I wrote 64 of them. One other person has written 4 and honestly I was thrilled. Google sent me 2 clicks last month, and the Instagram has 3 followers.
So that's the ask, really. Come take the palate quiz, rate one milk, tell me I'm wrong about one of them — especially tell me I'm wrong. And if anyone here has pulled a catalogue site out of the cold start, I'd take any advice going.