Tasting Guide
Sejin Kim
Friday, March 1, 2024
There are five major components to flavor: taste, aroma, texture, appearance, and the human element. What are each of these components? How do they influence how we perceive flavor? What might we detect with our human senses when we're tasting something?
Taste
Humans can only really detect five tastes using the tongue: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (Japanese for "deliciousness", referring to savory). In a beer, you can run across any and all of these flavors. Whether it is the brewer's goal to have that taste in the beer or other beverage is another question, but these are really the only tastes that we can detect. When you are tasting, focus on isolating each of these tastes. A dark porter may have sweet and umami notes, while a fruited sour may have sour and salty notes.
As a side note, whether "spicy" is a taste is a topic under active research. While it does activate receptors on our tongue and skin, it activates pain receptors, rather than taste receptors. Spiciness is understood by our brains as actual burning heat, rather than a chemical taste (like the glutimate receptors for umami or the sodium channel receptors for saltiness). That is, your brain perceives spiciness as your tongue literally being on fire or burning from something hot, leading to questions of whether it is truly "taste." (Fun fact, this is why you can't taste saltiness using your fingers, but you can feel spiciness in...other special places.) If you are brewing a fermented liquor with spicy peppers (like serrano or jalapeño peppers), much of the capsaicin (a benzylamine alkaloid that makes peppers taste hot) is extracted by the ethanol. If you want to make a spicy beer, you'll need enough capsaicin that the ethanol produced by the yeast cannot extract all of it. Most of the time, you should instead focus on the aromas that come from the pepper.
Aroma
Much of what humans perceive as taste is actually detected in our olfactory bulb as aroma, which contributes a lot to flavor. While there are only five tastes that we can detect with our tongues, our noses and olfactory receptors can detect hundreds of thousands or millions of different distinct aroma or smell molecules. When you are tasting, focus on how the aromas play with the tastes and what aromas you can detect. You might not be able to detect the same aromas as someone else, since everyone's nose is a little bit different.
Texture
While what we brew is always going to be a liquid, these liquids can have different textures. While subtle, it is not difficult to detect the feeling or texture of a liquid. For example, a dark milk stout might be thicker and smoother, while a Belgian tripel may be light and effervescent. Carbonation plays a big part of what we detect as texture in many of our beverages. Smoothness, viscosity (how thick a liquid is), carbonation (how much carbonation a beverage has), oiliness (whether an oily or greasy texture is left behind on your tongue or lips after swallowing), graininess (the presence of small particles), and chalkiness (a drying aftertaste effect) are just some of the textures you might be able to detect, either while the beverage is still in our mouth or as an aftertaste.
Appearance
How we perceive taste and texture in our mouths and aromas in our nose can be heavily influenced by the appearance. Is the beverage light or dark? Does it have a lot of head (foam) on the top? Is it crystal clear like a clarified cider, hazy like a juicy IPA, or opaque like a dark stout? Is the carbonation bubbling up, or does it appear still while it's sitting in your glass? The appearance of something can greatly influence the flavors that we're looking for when we taste something.
The Human Element
Humans are creatures of habit, and we will tend to certain things because we have formed good associations with those things. The human element is how we, as individual humans, approach something and expect certain things as a result. These often take the form of biases. For example, you might turn your nose away at an IPA because you don't like hops, even if that particular IPA has as many hops as a hefeweizen that you like, simply because it was classified as an IPA. In its stronger forms, it can even cause you to think you are tasting tastes or smelling aromas that aren't even there, simply because your brain is intercepting and distorting the signals that your tongue and nose are sending. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is something to keep in mind. You might think that you hate light American lagers, but it's actually the rice hulls in those lagers you don't like; if you got something that was an American lager but without the rice hulls, you still wouldn't like it because the human side of your brain has associated a light American lager with a flavor you don't like.
Citation
Kim, S. (2024). Tasting Guide. Mount Vernon Brew Club. https://mountvernonbrewclub.org/site/index.php/ontap/tasting-guide/.
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.