aroma

Another beer flavor/flavour wheel

Beer Flavor Wheel, Beer Flavour Wheel

Mark Dredge posted this new Beer Flavor Wheel today at Pencil and Spoon. (If you click on the image you’ll head over to his blog, where the wheel is a bit larger).

This is a much more drinker friendly wheel than the traditional one, created for Dredge’s new book, Craft Beer World, which just went to the printer. As mentioned here before, the beer flavor wheel was developed in the 1970s by the Master Brewers Association of the Americas and the American Society of Brewing Chemists following the lead of Danish flavor chemist Morten Meilgaard. It was one of the first such wheels. A wine aroma wheel came later, as did the Flavour Wheel for Maple Products, a South African brandy wheel, and a variety of other fun dials.

The Beer Wheel was not designed for consumers but to provide reference compounds that can be added to beer samples to represent the intended flavors. It continues to grow in size, and there is every possibility that the committees working on its redesign will settle on several subwheels.

Also mentioned here, and pictured in For the Love of Hops
the Hochschule RheinMain University of Applied Science created a Beer Aroma Wheel (actually two wheels) with the goal of providing terms more suitable for communicating with consumers and focusing less on defects.

Panelists who helped develop the terminology used aromas of fruits, spices, everyday materials, and other foodstuffs to describe their sensory impression. Because there is the rare occasion where 4-vinyl guaiacol is appropriate in conversation, but rare remains the best adjective. Clove works much better in mixed company (geeks and non geeks).

Perfect pitch and beer aroma

I love analogies to music when it comes to describing some of life’s other pleasures. This happens to come from Whiff! The Revolution of Scent Communication in the Information Age and doesn’t mention beer, but you’ll get the point:

As any wine connoisseur can attest, aromas are often described in melodic terms as three distinct notes. In making perfume, top notes, middle notes and base notes are orchestrated like a symphony to tell a specific story in three movements. Top notes are the ingredients that create the first impression of the fragrance on the nose. They are the lightest and briefest of the fragrance on the nose. They are the lightest and briefest in duration, like high notes on a musical scale. In a well-designed fragrance, as top notes evaporate they harmoniously segue into the middle notes that comprise the main body, or second movement, of the fragrance. The middle notes evaporate at an even slower rate than the top notes, and also soften the usually stronger base notes. As the middle notes dissipate, the base notes linger like the finals strains of a cello concerto.

(Additionally, in The Secret of Scent, Luca Turin explains why odor molecules — and thus aroma — arrive in waves, repeating that the lightest are the first to arrive, heavier ones later.)

Before you stick your nose deep in your next beer and decide I’m an idiot, please note I’m not saying this works for every beer. Then the special ones wouldn’t be special, would they? As a general rule, beers you’d file under “less is more” seem to be the best candidates.

Hold your nose, then sip

Is that your nose?OK, not necessarily something you want to do in public. But both a good way to learn a little more about the beer you are drinking and your own senses.

I was reminded of the value of tasting without first smelling while grinding through an academic paper related to hops (I try to tackle several a day because I have quite a collection). In this case the researchers were evaluating the bitterness intensity of various samples, and panelists wore nose plugs.

No need to do that at home. A simple squeeze will do. Take a sip without the benefit of “olfactory influences,” then one with. Or vice versa. Doesn’t even have to be a hop-heavy beer, although the results can be pretty interesting with a dry-hopped one.