Hot chocolate preferences are deeply personal: maybe you crave the milky, marshmallow and whipped cream–topped delicacies of childhood, or maybe you seek a thick, dark drinking chocolate like you’d find on a holiday in Spain. We gathered a handful of local brands, blended them with warm whole milk according to the instructions, and sipped away. Here’s what to stock in your pantry this winter.

Best Hot Chocolate

Woodblock Drinking Chocolate

This hot chocolate is wonderfully complex, without being too heavy on the chocolate: it's dark, not-too-sweet, and made up of finely ground 70 percent chocolate bars. If you’ve had Woodblock’s chocolate bars before, you know that certain varieties can bring out cacao’s fruity, slightly tropical flavors, and this drinking chocolate also falls into that category. We could see kids and adults enjoying it. One note: the instructions suggest three tablespoons of chocolate per one-cup serving; for our tastes, you only need two.

Very Good Hot Chocolates

Cloudforest All-Purpose Chocolate

The same all-purpose chocolate is used in Cloudforest’s cookies, hot chocolates, and pastries, so there are no specific instructions for preparing hot chocolate. We found that 2–3 tablespoons per cup is the sweet spot, and you might need a blender to fully incorporate all the coarse, pebble-sized chocolate pieces. This is definitely more of a hot chocolate for grown-ups, dark and slightly bitter with only a hint of sweetness.

We at Portland Monthly have long been fans of Cloudforest, a chocolate café that makes dreamy mugs of drinking chocolates, heavenly chocolate chip cookies, plus all kinds of chocolate to take home—bars, drinking chocolate, and more. If you’d rather leave the hot chocolate making to the pros, the Cloudforest café serves several variations, ranging from rich, super-dark drinking chocolate to lighter hot chocolates steamed with the milk of your choice.

Momo Cocoa’s Classic Cocoa Mix

It’s hard to appeal to the masses and stand out at the same time, but these little cocoa packets manage to do just that. Prominent chocolate flavor is balanced with a welcome dose of sugar and milk, making it appealing to both kids and adults. It’s also not too rich, so you can drink a big mug on a snowy day. “This would be solid for the whole family,” said a tester.

Okay Hot Chocolates

Moonstruck Dreamy Dark Chocolate Hot Cocoa

This one rests firmly in kid territory, with a sweetness that made our grown-up taste testers put down their mugs. “That has more sugar than chocolate,” said one tester. Some testers also detected vague, non-chocolatey aftertastes, from a cloying floral note to a marshmallowy sweetness.

Treehouse Original Drinking Chocolate with Dark Chocolate

This hot chocolate has a hint of adults-only bitterness, but is still sweet enough for kids to enjoy. Some of our testers detected a faint saltiness that didn’t seem intentional—more like the slightly salty, minerally flavor you get from commercial hot chocolate packets.

Wildwood Very Dark, Very Rich Drinking Chocolate

While this drinking chocolate was as thick, dark, and rich as promised, most of our testers found it lacked balance when mixed at the very high suggested chocolate-to-milk ratio. “That’s got a sharpness to it,” said one tester. Another also picked up an unwelcome floral, slightly salty flavor.

Hot Chocolate to Avoid

Swiss Miss Milk Chocolate Flavor

While all of our testers drank this hot cocoa as kids, it just doesn’t hold up for adults, especially in a chocolate-loving town like Portland. It’s super sweet, with just a ghostly whisper of cocoa powder that isn’t vaguely reminiscent of actual chocolate.