Level Up Your Beer Tasting and Description Skills #1

How do I get better at smelling, tasting, and describing beer? 

This is the first article in a series. Articles #2 and #3 are in the works and will be linked here when they're posted.

I hear this question all the time from my Beer Scholar students. What I hear from the general public is often more of a statement, "I'm not good at tasting and describing beer / wine / food, so I can't do the BJCP or Cicerone or Sommelier tests."

Never say that again. It's not true! Tasting skills are 100% LEARNED.  

Since the day I launched Beer Scholar, people have been asking me questions like this one I was asked on Reddit in 2014 (!) It's as relevant today as it was back then: 

"Are there any methods I could use to improve my ability to identify specific aromas and flavors in beers? When I read other users' ratings while drinking, I find it easier to notice a certain aspect that I wouldn't have been able to identify myself... but then I wonder how much is just the power of suggestion...Similarly, I might use words like "pine" and "earthy" and "resin" and "grassy," but it's not like I have a deep understanding of what each of those flavors are. It's more like I'm saying, "this beer tastes like beers others have called 'grassy,' and that's how I know it's grassy". I understand campfire smoke and chocolate, so flavors like those are easier for me. How did you train yourself to distinguish beer characteristics so specifically?"

Here are some key things to know as you begin to learn better beer tasting skills

1. Tasting and describing beer is a learned skill, not a natural talent. Like most things worth doing, it takes time and effort. Luckily, if you're excited to learn these skills and willing to put in the effort you'll have no problem leveling up rapidly! Think about this – you know how easy it is to make quick gains when you start a workout routine after not working out for awhile? It's the same with sensory skills. Simply going from zero to pretty damn good is quick and easy. It's simple, do your reps and make quick gains. No one is naturally good at sensory simply because they eat and drink. This is particularly true in the American cultural environment, with its emphasis on processed foods and eating quickly without focus or reflection. That thing where you rush down the sidewalk while scarfing down microwaved junk food from Starbucks...learning to taste is the exact opposite of that.
2. Everyone is more familiar with certain aromas and flavors. Those are flavors or food items you have experience more often or which you've taken time to reflect on while experiencing them. Maybe you just love certain things and pay more attention to them, like chocolate or coffee. In other cases, you've had a singular amazing experience that involved certain food or drink – there's a reason you remember an epic meal or the flavor of a particular beer, but forget 99.999% of the others. It's often because a server or bartender made the experience special for you, or maybe someone opened an epic bottle for you at your wedding dinner. Our memories are often strongly associated to particular settings and situations. Sensory memories are highly manipulable! You can do this on purpose. P.S. Cicerones have the knowledge and skills to create those special experiences for other people...maybe a special experience like that is what got you into beer?
3. Most of what you think of as "flavor" actually comes from aroma. If you don't believe me go ahead and hold your nose while eating a piece of fruity candy or taking a sip of beer. You'll notice you will not experience its "flavor." After a brief period of taking note of that lack of flavor, stop pinching it shut and breathe out through your nose. Suddenly all those flavors explode! In a future post I'll tell you why you may want to do a nose plug sip as part of your beer sensory analysis routine. 
4. "Taste," "flavor," and "aroma" are very different. It's important but difficult to relearn familiar terms, "taste" versus "flavor" in particular. When we talk about taste, we mean only the five basic tastes – sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami aka savory. Your taste buds (which, by the way, are all over your mouth and throat, not just on your tongue) can only taste those five basic tastes, that's why the nose plug sip works. When we talk about flavor, we're talking about the combination of taste and aroma together. Aroma is super complex, there are two types of aroma sensors and they send input to different areas of the brain. The first is the familiar orthonasal sniff you get when you breathe in, the other is called retronasal and you only experience it when you breathe out, or "down your nose." Now you understand why we use multiple sniff types and don't spit out beer that we're tasting. I'll teach you a routine for focused beer tasting in a future post!  
5. Your sense of smell has the ability to trigger memories and connections with past experiences in ways other senses can't. We've all had those weird experiences where we smell something that instantly takes us back to an event or a childhood memory. It's powerful – you can harness that effect and make that work for you by creating those connections purposefully. This happens thanks to the particular neural pathways aroma input takes through the brain. 
6. We don't all experience aromas and flavors in the same way. Sure, genetic differences may cause us to experience aroma and flavor in different ways, but even more important are cultural differences. There are huge cultural issues at play when it comes to sensory description. Someone who grew up on a farm in Alabama will not have the same culinary reference points as someone who grew up on the Upper East Side of New York City...not to mention how different those references will be with people from Mumbai or Tokyo. Keep that in mind if you're a city kid who's frustrated by terms like "barnyard," or if you're a rural Southerner who isn't familiar with the aroma of freshly baked rugelach. 
7. Aroma and flavor is highly suggestible...that doesn't mean those suggestions aren't useful. Ideally, analyze a beer on your own first, then hear what others say about it. Listen to their descriptions, but make your own judgements. Those folks may just be parroting what they've heard, don't allow them to twist things up for you if you don't think they're right. Pssst, here's a secret – we're all parroting what we've heard to some extent or another, this is how we learn and expand our vocabulary! Maybe those other suggestions will be enlightening and will help you dial in your tasting skills.
8. Leveling up your sensory skills can be difficult and complicated! It really helps to have guidance as you learn this stuff. I run a weekly beer tasting and Q&A for students in my Certified Cicerone® course – we use my Beer Scholar Style Sensory Analysis Worksheet to fully break down the beer of the week and together we come up with evocative descriptors for it that go beyond the generic descriptors you'll find in the BJCP Style Guidelines. Experienced tasters can help you link flavors / aromas with their common descriptors, they can help you to build your library of descriptors, and they can teach you how those flavors got into the beer. Grab my Free Study Guide for the Certified Cicerone® Exam if you'd like a copy of my Style Sensory Analysis Worksheet and info on developing a focused tasting routine. 

It's a process, but it's incredibly rewarding. It's exciting when it starts to click and you feel your senses getting sharper and quicker! You will never stop learning and making those mental connections. I'm an Advanced Cicerone and I'm still leveling up. Learning to taste is fun to do with other people and it teaches you to slow down and experience your food and drink. 

Actual issues that can complicate learning to taste

Just in case you got to the end of all that but you still think genetics is the major determinant of sensory abilities, that's not true, however... 

1. Scientists have found that women of childbearing age can be easier to train for sensory work. They seems to have a slight advantage over men when it comes to learning to taste. This is not a game changing difference.
2. Some people are genetically anosmic to, or incapable of smelling, certain compounds...but don't use this as an excuse to avoid learning sensory skills. You WILL have trouble with some of the off flavors on the Certified, Advanced, or Master Cicerone® syllabi. We all do. I still struggle with green apple-like acetaldehyde and canned corn-like DMS, two key off flavor compounds on the CC syllabus. I've also gone to Chicago for the weeklong Aroxa Sensory Training Course taught by the world's top beer sensory expert, Dr. Bill Simpson. There I witnessed people work through these difficulties and learn to identify compounds they thought they were anosmic to. At the highest levels of systematic sensory training in which you're tasting spiked samples over and over, day after day, you'll find your strengths and weaknesses, but this is NOT something to worry about even at the Certified Cicerone® level. If there's an off flavor you struggle with, keep working at it and you'll get it eventually! 
3. The "supertaster" thing...it's kinda sorta mostly bullshit. I'm actually a supertaster...but what does that mean? It simply means I have more tastebuds than average (25% of people are "supertasters," it's not very rare). Don't forget, tastebuds only taste...tastes. As in the five basic tastes. In particular, supertasters are more sensitive to bitterness AND THAT'S MOSTLY IT. Supertasters are also likely to be picky eaters due to that sensitivity affecting their diet preferences as kids, which carries on into adulthood and often causes them to dislike bitter foods. For me, there is actually a pretty big list of foods I don't like and I hate that I'm like that. Personally, I find it super annoying as a sensory expert to have this challenge of not wanting to try certain foods. That's just my own anecdotal experience, but it's hardly been an advantage when it comes to leveling up my sensory skills and beer tasting. Still, I'm not too shabby because I've WORKED at learning to taste and describe beer for many years! 
4. If you have a chronic nasal issue or you lost your ability to smell due to Covid, that really sucks and I'm very sorry. These are real issues that will make leveling up sensory skills more difficult or even impossible. There's a really simple way to protect your ability to taste and smell from the effects of long Covid...it's hard to imagine there are many people out there still who haven't been vaccinated and boosted, but if you haven't done it yet and you value your ability to smell things, get it done. Severe Covid can cause loss of smell and it's MUCH more common in people who have not been vaccinated. If tasting and smelling food and beer is important to you, forget the politics and get vaccinated ASAP. Haven't been boosted for a couple years? Get it done.