As I was starting to research my upcoming book Your Tasting Brain, I reached out to people I know in the sensory and beverage alcohol world to see what they thought was important and to share their expertise. I had known Gary from his connection to the Siebel Institute, and we had judged together at the Great American Beer Festival from time to time. I didn’t know Tony, who works with Gary, who thought he would add to the conversation—and he certainly did. These are highly experienced practitioners who never get lost in the theory, so we had a really fascinating discussion.
Gary is the owner/manager of BDAS, LLC. (Brewing & Distilling Analytical Services). Tony is Sensory & Education Administrator there. This interview took place in November, 2019.
RM: Can you describe your professional activities these days?
GS: There’s a write-up in Spirited magazine that pretty much tells the story. But Tony’s been into gin lately.
TA: We’ve been trying to learn about gin, and figure out how to do it. It’s a real art. I’m doing a lot of experiments running botanicals through a pot still and also through a rotovap [a vacuum system that does distillation at a lower temperature]. For some botanicals it doesn’t matter too much, but for others there’s quite a difference between 212 °F and the 34–40 °F in the rotovap, with a lot of cooked, maillard flavors at the higher temperatures. We’re trying to figure out which is best in any given situation. I’m taking copious notes.
It’s funny when you mix up the flavors. You can build up what is almost a perfect flavor, and then you add one more thing, and the whole thing goes to hell: “Well, I didn’t expect that!” There are all sorts of antagonisms between aroma compounds as they interact with our receptors.
I’m learning new vocabulary also. Balsamic is a term meaning warming, and camphoraceous, is the opposite: a cooling sensation and aroma.
I pick a commercial example as a target, then work to that. I like a gin called Aviation, but what I’ve found is that when the top note goes away, then there’s this anise note that comes up, and now I’m not so sure I like it as much anymore. Flavor creation is an iterative process, and a lot of things you do will not work the way you thought.
With any flavor creation, you have to realize your own sensitivities and blindnesses. I’m super-sensitive to eugenol [the main compound in cloves] and actually don’t like it that much, but Gary is more of a normal taster on that. If you’re really sensitive to one component, then it doesn’t matter what the rest of the formula is.
GS: There’s this thing called the Flavorists Triangle that shows the way they put formulas together. There are three groups of flavors in any mixture, divided by how quickly they evaporate: the top note, the middle, or “heart” note, and the base note. The base note often has characteristics of a fixative, which has certain effects. We’re trying to learn from the perfume industry, to think about gin in that way, and using these fixative properties to make longer-lasting, fresher-tasting gin.
TA: We had a suspicion that gin deteriorates after it’s opened, so we set up some triangle tests and ran them by the people who were helping teach our gin class. Their results confirmed that gin goes off very quickly, as oxygen interacts with the flavor components.
GS: I’m encouraging makers to sell a two-pack of 375 mL bottles so the whole thing doesn’t have to be opened at the same time.
RM: Let’s talk about bias in tasting…
GS: We looked at a lot of different kinds of bias, especially in the medical and psychological field.
TA: Bias by itself is not a bad thing. It’s a great thing, actually.
RM: In a lot of ways, we’re bias engines. It’s how we survive—a form of learning.
TA: But to be objective is really difficult, as in judging or being on a sensory team. So one of the most important things is to just understand your own biases. Take that eugenol. In [Bavarian] wheat beers, it’s an important aroma component, along with banana, so you get beers that lean one way or another, or have a perfect balance between the two flavors. But for me, I find that clove aroma really taxing. So you really need to know when you’re an outlier, and maybe should recuse yourself from certain styles of beer.
GS: There’s another bias those wheat beers bring up. Until recently, most people considered cloudiness in beer to be a flaw, so you had people saying “Don’t give me those muddy beers.”
TA: There’s also a bias about things you make yourself, and the tendency is to think everything you do is great. We call it “house bias,” a kind of halo effect where you think “Our products are always great.” This is obviously a problem
GS: We see some distillers, new to the business. And they love their own bourbon, but don’t seem to think much of anyone else’s—even some well-respected brands with long histories and huge resources. So they’re not really bourbon tasters in general, just appreciators of their own bourbon. It’s the same with beer, wine, anything. It’s not that uncommon.
RM: So how do you fight that?
GS: It takes some time. There’s a lot of institutional knowledge out there as well. Here’s a story from Woodford reserve. There was an off-flavor identified by some sensory panels that no one could really describe or identify. They reached out to a retired 30-year veteran who was running tours at the distillery. He took a sniff and said “There’s a bolt in fermenter 35 that’s not properly passivated [rust-proofed] and it happened ten years ago. So it was essentially a metallic contamination. You’ve got a lot of people working in the rick-houses, some of them third generation—and it’s not all written down.
TA: First thing, take great notes. You need to go back and think really hard about what you’re doing and what the absolute quality is.
RM: And not buy into your own brand story too much?
GS: We see a lot of people knowing what beers they’re tasting—we think it’s better when they don’t. It’s also a good idea to slip some competitive products into your sensory panels, and make sure they’re good ones. You can use spiking with flavor chemicals as well, but we find it works best when the flavor changes are positive.
TA: And keep score on your panelists. Let people know who needs to work a little harder or get them some help. Get them motivated to pay attention
GS: It’s also helpful to come up with five specific flavor terms that characterize any product and have your tasters focus on those.
RM: How do you help people who are just starting their path to becoming a professional taster? Any helpful tips?
GS: We try to get people to use a standard vocabulary. You can use any words you want as long as they’re consistent and everybody on the team knows what they represent. People use terms related to their experience like: “grandma’s basement,” but I don’t know what your grandma’s basement smells like; I only know my own grandma’s. So you have to common language. And if you’re going to use a common language, it might as well be the industry standard one, so you can talk to people outside your own company. Of course, different audiences have different needs and interests.
TA: Self training can be very helpful. If you see a term like gooseberries, then maybe you can go out and actually get some and see what they smell and taste like. We attended a gin launch at Castle & Key Distillery, and they had all their botanical raw materials in glasses so people could smell, even taste them, so people could think about how the parts make up the whole.
GS: Classes are important. We still use 12 basic vocabulary spikes. Tony recommends going out and judging beer at BJCP or county fair competitions. I think most professional tasters try to break it down into chemical groups: acids, esters, phenols, etc. Each one has a different character to a point. Lactones are juicy and fatty. One of the best known is the peach lactone [gamma undecalactone]. You don’t need the cream with the peach—you’ve got the cream right there.
TA: Some things can be confusing, so you learn how to tell the difference. I struggled telling caramel from diacetyl. For me, diacetyl just keeps building and building,
RM: Maybe because it’s an oily chemical that may be sticking to your tongue?
TA: Something like that. But with caramel you get it and then it doesn’t change or build.
RM: Are there pitfalls or traps to avoid when training tasters?
TA: Don’t assume people really know the difference between the basic tastes like sweet, salty, umami, etc—you have to train on that. Whether fat is a taste or not is a little controversial, but if it is, we’ll have to train on that also.
We did a thing at Metro State, and we asked people to describe a slice of toast without using the word “toast” or describing its texture. We eat it so fast nobody cares, and often we care more about the butter on it than the toasted bread itself. In their normal lives, people just don’t take the time to really focus on breaking things down into vocabulary. There are a lot of flavors in that toast: roasty, caramel and so on.
GS: And remember that people can only identify three or four aromas out of a mixture, so there is a limit to how much we can take in.
As we learned from a class at The Institute for Perception, we forget details of aroma very quickly. We did some experiments with duo-trio sensory tests, where the panelists job is to compare two different samples to the control and identify which one is the same as control, and which one is different. We found we got better results when we put the control as the second taste, as it was forgotten by time the third sample came up if we placed it first.
RM: How do you organize the universe of aroma relative to the things you taste?
TA: It’s difficult. We don’t describe aroma vocabulary terms like we do visual objects. We’re designed to survive, and we have the system we need.
GS: There are a lot of ways to do it, but one of the simplest is to think: “Is it animal? Vegetable? Fruit? Mineral?
TA: Aroma molecules can be perceived differently by each of us and also in context. First we need to get people to get a common understanding of intensity. You might rate the intensity of an aroma component a 2 out of 5, but for me it’s through the roof. So I need to understand I’m extra sensitive, to dial it down and try to make comments that take that into account.
And they can be tricky to characterize, so don’t use just one source of information about what these chemicals are supposed to smell like. DMS [dimethyl sulfide, a grain-derived aroma compound] is usually described as “canned corn,” but I went years looking for that corn, and then one day Gary called a beer “kind of oystery,” then that was it for me. That’s how I think of it.
RM: Yeah, I had that experience with acetaldehyde, looking for the green apple, but it’s more raw pumpkin for me.
TA: It’s like walking into a flower shop for me.
GS: There’s a particular flavor in Bourbon I don’t much care for, but I never could characterize, although I suspected it was maybe a sulfur compound. Then someone described it as “red rubber ball”—one of those cheap toys from my childhood, and that was it.
RM: Do you switch to different vocabulary systems as you switch from beverage to beverage?
GS: A lot of the vocabulary is the same, but what changes is what’s appropriate or considered an off-flavor in any given beverage. Diacetyl in a big California chardonnay is not considered by most people as a flaw, but in a beer it would be. With spirits, you have to really think about hot alcohols in a way that’s different than in wine or beer.
RM: For people who may have some familiarity with beer or wine, what do they need to know about tasting spirits in terms of technique?
GS: Well, there is that alcohol and it really affects people differently. In my experience, women are particularly sensitive to the burn.
It does take a couple of sips before the alcohol stops burning. I use it as a way to remind me what I’m doing: “I’m tasting bourbon today.”
RM: Is there a point where the barrel character sort of takes over?
GS: Yes. After a certain time, yeah, maybe it’s over the hill. Booker Noe [legendary Jim Beam distiller] and those other old guys wouldn’t put their name on anything more than eight years old. Too much oxidation; you lose something. There used to be almost no bourbons more than eight years old. Very old bourbons are something that has come on lately.
Twelve years or more is a long time to hold onto something. From a producer’s standpoint, you have to think about what revenue it’s generating, because it’s taking up prime real estate in the rick-house.
RM: Is “smoothness” in vodka just a lack of harshness or a characteristic of something present?
Vodka has devastating subtlety. It does appear there is something that happens with the way the water and alcohol molecules interact as the mix gets more pure. It seems to add to the smoothness, and it looks as if the esters and other congeners actually get in the way of this interaction. pH also appears to have an effect on the alcohol burn.
There’s also a thing in the spirits world believe in called “bruising.” This is thought to occur when high-proof spirits are diluted in one big step, rather than little-by-little. It’s not totally clear whether this is a real thing or not.
RM: I’ve heard that many brands have vanilla added as long as it’s below the TTB’s threshold for non-labeled additives. True?
GS: That would be illegal if it were not labeled. The only allowable additives are citric acid and sugar. There is a vodka that’s filtered through polished rice, which extracts a fair amount of sugar.
RM: Thanks, guys!