Happy New Year!
Now more than ever, during these times of physical distancing, chocolate lovers need to find and embrace new ways to transcend language & time zone barriers to build community around our favorite subject: CHOCOLATE 🍫😋
Tangential Tasting Twin Tuesday (aka TTTT) has been played on Instagram for more than a year, though you might not have realized that until now.
Since there aren’t many opportunities for me to get together with friends to taste chocolate, I wondered if there was a creative way to virtually share a common experience with friends around the globe.
One morning, at the end of June 2019, I looked at my Instagram feed and drew inspiration from a chocolate that another friend had posted about earlier in the day. I searched my stash & found something similar that I could riff on. It was like “tag team tasting” & I hoped to spur other friends to do the same thing after seeing my post.
It took a little while for the concept to gain traction, but soon a totally random Tuesday pastime has become a more organized weekly event!
We started posting about specific origins and/or makers & often people would choose an identical bar – we call that instance a “twin” (and sometimes there are even “triplets”). Well, we certainly didn’t want anyone to feel left out of the fun when they didn’t have a bar matching the weekly theme and that’s where “tangential” comes into play.
Let’s say the theme was Madagascar and I posted about Dandelion Chocolate’s bar – well, someone else might have Dandelion’s Costa Esmeraldas (Ecuador) bar and THAT WOULD ABSOLUTELY COUNT! In my head, it was like the game of Scrabble… each person’s post could potentially lead us into a new direction by building on what was posted by others!
After we exhausted as many countries of origin as feasible, we switched to a more “open ended” alphabet theme (I swear, I didn’t influence participants even though I *clearly* love A through Z projects)! Check out #TTTT_H through #TTTT_Z for ideas & to see how we grew week-over-week. You’re probably wondering what happened to weeks A through G – well, it took us a while to figure out the best naming convention/nomenclature – prior to letters, we were using the date instead (for example #TTTT03Mar).
For the last four months of 2020, we painted a virtual chocolate rainbow (#TTTT_Rainbow) with a different color each week, starting with #TTTT_Pink and ending with #TTTT_Black.
Starting on January 5th, we are returning once again to the alphabet. Consider this your invitation to participate! It doesn’t matter who you are within the chocolate community or what language you speak…EVERYONE IS WELCOME to join the TTTT “tribe”!
When you post, please use the #TTTT_2021 hashtag + the hashtag for the week. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me at @myic2016.
Looking forward to seeing what YOU post this week for #TTTT_A!