Another Happy Friday to you, beer fans! Stop in and share a cold one with FNBB!
Last year I mentioned when it happened, the homebrew club did what we called the "off flavors tasting".
The homebrew community has lots of competitions, requiring trained judges, and the idea is that if you're judging homebrew, you need to be able to detect, recognize, and describe a variety of flavors that don't belong in the beer. These might be caused by age, oxidation, or various kinds of process imperfection. The worst are sanitation failures where bacteria get into the beer. A number of people from the club (not me) took the first judging exam earlier this year.
We obtained the "Sensory Training" kit from Siebel with 24 flavor samples
Siebel doesn't provide much in the way of description or explanation of what you get. We saw a useful powerpoint slideshow along with the tasting, but this wasn't shared so all I have are my notes.
We worked through those in two sessions of 12 samples each, here are the notes from the first half.
Setup: The kit is intended to produce each flavor at about 3x the typical threshhold of detection when added to 1 liter of beer. This threshhold is going to vary from person to person, and I think for most of us there were some that we didn't pick up at all. The flavors were added to Coors Light since it has so little flavor of its own to get in the way of detecting the test flavor.
Several of these flavors aren't necessarily "off" depending on the style of beer, so it wasn't purely a joke when some people described them as improving the Coors. Only a couple of this group (Butyric and Earthy) were universally perceived and hated. The second group will have a higher percentage of really nasty flavors.
1. Acetaldehyde - green apple flavor, described by some as the signature flavor of Budweiser.
2. Acetic - at the test level perceptibly sour, but no big vinegar aroma like some sour beers.
3. Almond - not referring to any nutlike flavors from the malt, this is an oxidation flavor.
4. Butyric - rancid butter flavor and aroma. Very unpleasant.
5. Diacetyl - the standard description of this is "butterscotch", which many of us could not pick up although we perceived something wrong, especially in the aftertaste.
6. D.M.S. (Dimethyl Sulfide) - generally described as "cooked corn". I wasn't the only one who had trouble detecting anything off at the test level.
7. Earthy - some hops are described as "earthy", the word is also often used for Italian red wines. Those are not bad things; this is. It seemed most of us had a clear idea what dirt tastes like and had no trouble recognizing it.
8. Mercaptan - the classic skunk aroma caused by exposure to light. The test level was definitely lower than a typical bottle of Corona or Heineken.
9. Ethyl Acetate - described as "fruity" or "solventy"; I knew I didn't like it but couldn't recognize either of those qualities.
10. Ethyl Hexanoate - apple flavor, wrong for a lager but not unpleasant.
11. Spice - again, wrong for a lager but not unpleasant. 10 + 11 were the ones often described as "improving the Coors".
12. Metallic - nothing else to say about this one.
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Part 2 of the tasting sometime later.
I've got Bitburger Pils, which should be cold by now. What are you drinking? Who's brewing?