Spiking Beer for Science
As a homebrewer and beer enthusiast, I’ve often wished I had access to bad beer. Seriously. You only need to spend a few months around other beer enthusiasts before flavor profiles and reviews begin to include words like DMS and diacetyl, cream corn and movie theater popcorn butter, blah blah blah. Sure these word associations can describe the off flavors to some extent, but I wanted to be able to taste what exactly they were describing using my own taste buds. The other day I came across a paragraph in the book “Tasting Beer,” by Randy Mosher, describing my dream tool: Flavoractiv’s “The Enthusiast.”
The EnthusiastTM Beer Taste Troubleshooting kit is the result of our partnership with the US Institute for Brewing Studies and the American Homebrewer’s Association. Early in 2000 we embarked together on a project that would result in a training product that would help small-scale brewers, whether brewing commercially or in the home, to identify common problem situations through tasting. After two years of effort we came up with the world’s first ‘situational flavour standards’ – flavour standards that represent not one problem flavour, but a mix of flavours which together represent a typical problem.
The kit includes a pipet and a bunch of chemicals. The idea is to take a known beer – something with a low SRM and malt character – say a Pilsner, and use the pipet to spike small samples of beer with the chemical which induces the exact off-flavor found in bad beer, while keeping a sample of the unspiked known beer around to contrast and compare–each chemical inducing a different off flavor.
I want to get 4-5 friends together to go in on one of these kits, and have a bad beer tasting party. So much fun. Yes, I’m a beer geek. Also, I was in no way paid by FlavorActiv for this post, but if they are reading this and would like to send me a free sample, I would not object.
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