 | | | | | |  | Taster Validation |  | | | | |
Tasting is one of the most important activities in your brewing company.
Maintenance and improvement of beer quality demands that we are able to: - Reliably tell one beer from another
- Measure the size of the differences between products
- Describe the differences
- Produce a quantitative description of our beer flavour that provides a benchmark for us to aspire to
A consistent, reliable group of tasters is needed to achieve these goals. They have to be able to recognize the presence of flavour compounds in beer at commercially-significant concentrations. And they have to be able to provide an accurate and correct description of the flavour attribute.
Sound taster selection procedures, good training, and an encouraging, stimulating environment will go a long way to producing the tasters we need.
But, once we have trained them to the standard we expect, on-going monitoring is needed to check their performance.
The FlavorActiVTM Taster Validation Scheme has been developed to allow you to measure, in an objective way, the ability of your tasters to detect and recognize common beer flavour characters.
HOW DOES THE SYSTEM WORK?
At the heart of the system lie FlavorActiV's Beer Flavour Standards. Authentic beer flavours, presented in beer at a consistent concentration and flavour intensity, they form the basis of the assessment of taster performance.
In a typical assessment session each taster in our taste panel is presented with seven beer samples.
One of these samples (the reference sample) is a normal beer, with nothing added to it. The other six samples may contain a single added beer flavour at a concentration of 3x flavour threshold.
At this concentration, the flavour will be recognizable, but not too easily.
The assessors' task is to smell and taste each beer and decide on the identity of the flavour. They use a flavour identification form to record their scores.
After the flavour evaluation session, it is the task of the session Administrator to enter the results onto a master record sheet. From there the results are entered into the FlavorActiVTM Taster Validation System. This is a web-based database system that provides multi-level password-protected access.
The reports in the software allow us to ask questions such as: - How well is our company performing with respect to sensory analysis?
- How do the different breweries in our group compare?
- How is the company and our brewery performing over time - are we improving?
- Where are our strong points? Where are our weak points? Which flavours do we have to get better at identifying?
Access to the information is provided at different levels. An individual brewery has full access to its own data. Information about the results of other breweries in the group is available, but only after the names of the breweries and the assessors have been removed.
Group access gives the Company's Head Office access to all of the information in the system.
The FlavorActiVTM Taster Validation Scheme is a powerful tool to maintain and improve the quality of your sensory operations. | | | |
