Not an excuse for what you said down the pub last night, but microencapsulated reference materials to train tasters in the subtleties of beer flavours
Flavoractiv has recently celebrated the seventh anniversary of the launch of its beer flavour standards.
Designed for use by both specialists and non-specialists, the standards help tasters learn to recognise and name 33 important flavours associated with beer.
As the first of their kind made available to the professional brewing community, they have since earned enthusiastic support from users in more than 600 breweries in 120 countries.
Flavoractiv was founded in 1996 by brewing scientist Bill Simpson and brewer Simon Hadman.
Today the company has grown substantially and supplies flavour reference standards, multi-media training aids, training courses, taster validation services, and a brand flavour fingerprinting service to its brewery and beer retailing customers throughout the world.
It has provided support for the home-brewing community through a partnership with the American Homebrewers Association.
And it has recently developed products and services for the spirits and soft drinks industries.
Background It is somewhat ironic, given the sophistication of today's modern brewery operations, that tasting and smelling of beer remain as important as ever.
In this area at least, man has not been replaced by machine. Traditionally, tasting experts (often a senior brewer) have judged the quality of the beer they produced.
Today, a more sophisticated approach is possible.
Rather than using a single assessor to check beer flavour quality, teams or panels of assessors are used.
These teams analyse beer flavour by breaking it down into its component parts.
Historically, training and validation of beer tasters was carried out using authentic samples of beer that possessed distinctive flavour characteristics, or by addition of pure flavour compounds to beer.
The first approach pre-supposes ability on the part of at least one or two people in the organisation to recognise and name the flavour characters that form the subject of the training.
In the absence of prior flavour training this is clearly not possible.
It is also a rather hit and miss affair, the concentration and character of the target flavour not being within the control of the trainer.
Addition of food-grade flavours directly to beer is relatively straightforward.
However, drawbacks include the high aroma activity of many flavours, their lack of sensory purity, and safety concerns in their use. Flavoractiv overcame these problems by developing stabilised powdered forms of flavours commonly associated with beer.
The choice of chemicals to represent each flavour, together with the right name to use for each one, was made easy as a result of the work of the American Society of Brewing Chemists, European Brewery Convention, and Master Brewers Association of the Americas almost 25 years earlier.
The stabilisation methods developed by Flavoractiv and its technical partners, which are based on several different microencapsulation technologies, allow the flavours to remain stable for years.
The standards cover a broad range of beer flavour attributes.
They include hop-derived characters (hop oil, kettle hop, isovaleric), malt-derived characters (DMS, grainy, vanilla, smoky), yeast-derived characters (isoamyl acetate, ethyl hexanoate, caprylic, H2S, mercaptan), flavours associated with transport and storage of beer (papery, metallic, lightstruck, almond, spicy, acetaldehyde) and a variety of off-flavours and taints (including diacetyl, musty, alkaline, catty, earthy, phenolic, chlorophenol and butyric).
The flavours are provided in unit-dosed capsules, each containing enough to produce one litre of flavoured beer.
This is sufficient to train a group of ten assessors.
Information sheets about each flavour (Flavoractivt Flavorfiles) are also available in several languages including English, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian.
These are used as an aid to the training process.
The advantages of using microencapsulated beer flavour standards include: They are easy to use, requiring no laboratory facilities, making them suited to application across the whole supply chain.
They are environmentally-friendly and safe.
There are no hazards associated with their use.
They release no extraneous smells into the environment.
They pose no health risks to users (either in the short term or in the long term).
They pose no fire risk, since even potentially explosive flavours are rendered non-flammable by the microencapsulation process.
They present no problems in disposal, unlike the neat flavour chemicals from which they are manufactured.
They are portable and easily transported.
They are accepted as cabin baggage by all major airlines.
In contrast, it is illegal to attempt to carry flavour chemicals such as isoamyl acetate, diacetyl, etc, in liquid form.
And in a post 9/11 world airlines are increasingly intolerant of 'suspect' and potentially flammable materials.
They allow a precise quantity of flavour to be added to beer.
This quantity has been calculated by Flavoractiv to be appropriate for training more than 95% of the population.
There are a variety of applications for beer flavour standards.
These include training of tasters involved in production of beer - both experts and taste panels; validation of taster performance; training of sales and distribution staff; journalist training; development of consumer interest, via focus groups and other organised opportunities for tasting; and development of new beers, using the standards to create new products for evaluation in minutes rather than weeks.
