Sensory Analysis

One of the new classes that started back at the beginning of the second module was sensory analysis. Basically analyzing beer with... your senses. Simple. You are probably thinking something like, "Ha! I knew they were just there to drink beer in class!" However, we didn't dive into beer tasting right away. So far we have been doing alot of training of the four basic tastes - sweet, sour, bitter and salty - to get everybody on the same page. So what's the training?

On a typical day we would have a selection of 4 to 8 numbered cups of water with unknown concentrations of sucrose (sweet), citric acid (sour), caffeine (bitter) and salt... (salty). In the beginning it was just a matter of identifying which cup held which basic flavor but things got steadily more complex. By the third or fourth class we had two sets of 4 cups, each set with a basic taste, and had to them in order of concentration. This meant identifying the taste and then figuring out the order. But the HIGH concentration cup was at the LOWER threshold of what people normally can taste, so that's where it turns into training.

Unsuprisingly it was we Americans that had the most difficulty with bitterness. Everyone blames this on the IPAs we drink in the States with bitterness so high we can't tell the difference between mild bitterness levels anymore. Whatever the reason, it all tasted like water to me!

Today we had our first class where we actually had some beer. That doesn't mean we were tasting different beers though. We had two sets of three cups of beer. Each set had had an additional basic taste added. Two cups were at a low concentration and one cup had a higher concentration and we had to figure out which one was not like the others. One set had 1.5 g/L and 3 g/l sucrose while the other had 0.063 g/L and 0.125 g/L caffeine. Luckily we were told ahead of time for this one which set contained which basic flavor added to it. Still, it is ridiculously more difficult to taste basic flavor differences of tenths of a gram per liter in beer than it is in water.

Try it sometime. Grab a beer from the fridge and add a little bit of sugar to one and a little more to another and then try and figure out which is which (Or lemon juice or salt, etc.) I was getting better at tasting the bitterness difference in water but now that we have graduated to beer... not so good.

Of course the only way to improve is to do some sensory analysis... homework. On that note, why not crack open a beer and analyze away. Cheers!