TOPIC:

Oh boy am i glad i didnt sign up for this!!

My other advice is to not attempt too many in a row at a given event or people might end up sick and your sense of smell and taste is just going to get dull after a while.

It's actually pretty tough going for some of them. (Although Diacetyl I still maintain can be quite pleasant.)

The descriptions of many of the fermentation and off-flavors that are supposed to be fruit-like actually taste/ smell much more often like artificial candy versions of those fruits than the actual fruits. -The banana ester tastes like banana candies; not real banana as an example.

"Wet cardboard" definitely reminds me exactly of "wet cardboard" and does what it says on the tin, though.

Adam

Looking at your list the nasty ones (depending upon concentration) will be:
butyric -really bad
DMS -really bad at high concentrations
isovaleric -really bad at high concentrations
caprylic

Of these we only did DMS but I know the flavor descriptors and other occurrences of these other chemicals in nature so I know they're not going to be super pleasant.

-I'd recommend only doing 1 or 2 of these in each tasting event and leaving them for the last.

They just moved back my start date for my new job to the middle of July so I might actually be able to make it for the first 1 or 2 of these! Woohoo X a million!


Also, some of these chemicals are oils and can be difficult to smell if you don't shake them up. -The hop oils, for example. You can of course try to spike them in beer and smell them but it might be useful to bring along a couple of plastic tubes with a lid and add the oil to a small bit of water in a tube and then shake them and take off the lid and pass them around to smell them. -Then you have tiny oil particles in the air that you can actually smell. Geranoil is actually the only hop oil that I see in the list so this shouldn't be a big deal.

Adam

Adam is making this whole thing sound scary now, I was sure all I'd have to do is lob it into a jug with a couple of cans of lager!!!

I guess I'll have to get organised before the kick off!!

Thanks for the comments Adam, it's helpful to know which ones not to start with!

"Biertourist":37ijh2i4 wrote: I just went through a spiked beer off-flavor and beer fermentation by-product tasting / smelling as a part of my course at Brew Lab in Sunderland and I can DEFINITELY add that you do NOT want large quantities of beer spiked with this stuff.
Adam[/quote:37ijh2i4]

Off Topic: Did they show you how to use a DO meter???

Will

Still waiting for a reply from somewhere ( Beoir/Jims ) about "using a DO meter"

Padraic,

I can help and I'm actually thinking about the smelling/tasting order and logistics and getting together descriptions of the chemicals and where they come from / what steps of the brewing process they are introduced in.

Oh yea, I'm officially signing up for the June 28 / July 5th tastings, too.

I've even found some instructions for the best way to identify some of these tastes and smells. Some are oils so you really need to get the oils into the air by putting your hand over the glass and swirling it pretty vigorously; some of the smells are best detected with multiple short inward breaths and others are best detected with a single long inward breath.


Will, they refused to discuss DO meters and brushed them off as too expensive for a UK micro and generally unnecessary if you follow best practice. I am with you and feel like you can't hope to improve something if you don't measure it; there are DO meters that are supposedly pretty good and are just a bit more expensive than the high accuracy, small range hydrometers that micros already buy so I think its a no-brainer to buy one, myself. If you figure out how to use it, please post here and let us know.
-In the meantime I've asked my Food Science PHD buddy for the official procedures for DO testing and what specs are important in a meter. (His scientific grade meters cost probably 20x as much as one you or I might buy.)


Adam