The Enthusiast Beer Taste Troubleshooting Kit

By John Chubick, Club Member

The ABNormal Brewers Club has kicked off its 20th anniversary year with an emphasis on helping members improve upon the already excellent beers we brew. In our January meeting Don primed us for a series of upcoming presentations using The Enthusiast Beer Taste Troubleshooting Kit. Don’s Taste Profiling presentation educated us on the importance of the sense of smell in tasting and which areas of the tongue are responsible for sensing various flavor components.

Beginning with our February meeting we will build upon the foundation Don has laid as we start a series of monthly presentations using The Enthusiast Beer Taste Troubleshooting Kit from FlavorActiv. This kit was engineered to help brewers identify flavor faults by actually tasting samples of eight different off-flavors commonly found in beer.  Along with providing us with the ability to recognize these flavor faults this series of presentations will educate the club on what can cause them and how they can be prevented.

You may wish to review Don’s handouts from our January meeting and bring a copy to upcoming meetings for reference. If you wish to listen to an audio podcast of a group of home brewers’ first-hand experience with the FlavorActiv kit visit the Basic Brewing Radio web site at 01-26-06 Basic Brewing Radio - Bad Beer Tasting - Pt. 1 and 02-16-06 Basic Brewing Radio - Bad Beer Tasting - Pt. 2.

This series of presentations promises to be very informative. So, mark your calendar now. You won’t want to miss them!

Read the rest of the article for the recommended steps from the FlavorActiv web site for using the kit.

Tony, our Technical Czar will direct us on the order in which flavors will be presented and may slightly modify these steps in order to best meet the needs of a club meeting setting. We will start with a lightly flavored base beer and basically proceed as follows:

Step 1.
Become familiar with the aroma and taste of the regular beer (with nothing added to it).

Step 2.
Add the first flavor to 12 fl oz of beer. Mix the beer gently to dissolve the flavor. Serve the beer in clean, odorless glasses.

Step 3.
Take a look at the information sheet that accompanied the flavor. This will make sure you know something about the flavor before you taste it.

Step 4.
Now taste the sample. Swirl the glass gently and begin by taking short sniffs. Then, take a longer sniff. Now cover the glass with your hand and continue to swirl the sample. Take away your hand and take one long sniff. Finally, take the sample into your mouth and taste it. Swallow the beer to appreciate the after-taste.

Step 5.
Now you have become familiar with each of the flavors, it’s time to find out what you’ve learned. Get someone to change the order of the samples, so that you don’t know which is which. Now go back to each of them and try to recognize them. At the first attempt you should be able to achieve a score of more than 4 out of 8. This marks the end of session 1.

Step 6.
Session 2 involves consolidating what you’ve learned. Go back through steps 1-5, first of all learning what the different beer flavors taste like, then checking your ability to recognize them. The difference is, this time around you should expect to score at least 6 out of 8.

Step 7.
Now for your final test. In the third session, go through steps 1-5 once more, but this time add each flavor to 24 fl oz of beer, rather than the 12 fl oz used in the first two sessions. It will be harder to detect the faults, and even harder when you take the test, but you should aim for a score of nothing less than perfection - 8 out of 8.