Back to baseline

It took us nearly three days of class to get through the details of malting. As I wrote before, malting is a fascinating field that blends agriculture, economics, industrial design, biochemistry, soil science, and brewing, but its intricate processes take place far from the day-to-day of a brewhouse. So, it was a refreshing change Wednesday afternoon when we moved on to sensory analysis and flavor identification in beer.

My old roommate in Leadville, Danny, always tried to argue that "in matters of taste there is no right and wrong." And while that may hold true for whether one TV show is better than another, taste--as a tool for brewing and understanding beer--isn't to be treated so trivially. Good tasters take years to develop and refine their palate, learning personal bias and taking it into account; practicing a shared vocabulary with other tasters. It is an inexact science, as we were often reminded, but it is not without discipline. Through years of trying beers and setting them to memory, I was excited to finally have a chance to take some formal sensory training and see where my experience put me.

As we returned from our final break of the day, each seat in our class had nine glasses and one bottle of Budweiser in front of it. Budweiser, we learned soon after sitting down, would be our "baseline beer." We would be given tastes from nine different bottles of Budweiser that had been spiked with various componds--ranging from table salt to isovaleric acid, sucrose to geraniol. The goal was to learn to identify the most common off flavors in beer, such as oversweetness (or harsh bitterness), metallic flavors, skunkiness, and so on. After each taste, we took notes on the spiked beer and then returned to our baseline palate with a sip of our control beer.

To the straitlaced, this may seem like alcohol abuse in class--tasting 12 beers side by side. This is nonsense. Just as tasting is about precision, it's also about moderation. Over an hour, we each drank the equivalent of one pint of beer. No one's palate ever got better trained by buying into the abstinence-or-abuse paradigm.

The spikes were each set to three times the perceptible threshold--present enough that they should be detectable but not overwhelming. Interestingly, most of the flavors (and aromas, in some cases) were immediately obvious. Sample 8, spiked with isobuteraldehyde, had the unmistakble aroma of warm Grape Nuts and tasted dry, harsh, and dusty. Sample 10 which had been treated with isovaleric acid was gooey cheese ("They smell like his feet after a match," said one of the brewers in our class from Cerveceria Modelo about another). It didn't taste nearly as bad as it smelled. Sample 5, which was 25 bittering units stronger than typical Budweiser, tasted quite good.

The tastings will continue through the course--both on particular beer styles and on flavors and off-flavors, at a rate of one a week. Spreading it out helps all of us avoid the number one killer of sensory skill, and also another reason to moderate rather than abuse beer: tongue fatigue. When that hits, it's time to go back to brewing theory.

Salud!