Molasses Flavour Standard

Refine your sensory evaluation skills with FlavorActiV’s Molasses Flavour Standard, a high-quality GMP-certified reference used globally by beverage professionals and sensory panels. This flavour standard captures the signature characteristics of molasses—rich caramel, burnt sugar, and earthy sweetness, offering a reliable benchmark for taste and aroma recognition across multiple beverage categories.

Each pack contains five individually blister-packaged capsules, ensuring long shelf life and consistency for repeated training sessions. Trusted by breweries, distilleries, coffee producers, and soft drink brands worldwide, this standard is essential for improving panel accuracy and product quality.

We ship globally – shipping costs may apply depending on your region

Minimum Order: £275

Molasses Flavour Standard Overview

The Molasses Flavour Standard is a controlled sensory reference designed to help professionals accurately identify, describe, and quantify molasses-related flavour characteristics. It supports:

Sensory training and flavour calibration
Off-flavour detection and prevention
Product development and benchmarking
Quality control during production

Its highly reproducible format ensures identical flavour delivery in every training session.

What Is Molasses Flavour?

Molasses flavour is a deep, dark sweetness characterised by:

Burnt sugar and caramel
Treacle-like richness
Earthy, slightly bitter undertones
Warm roasted and dark syrup notes

This flavour profile is commonly associated with dark beers, rum and aged spirits, roasted coffee, and some thermally processed soft drinks.

What Causes Molasses Flavours in Beverages?

Molasses off-flavour can develop intentionally or unintentionally during production due to:

Maillard reactions and caramelisation during malt roasting or heat processing
Use of dark sugars or molasses as ingredients
Barrel ageing, which contributes charred wood and burnt sugar notes
Specific yeast fermentation by-products
Over-roasting, oxidation, or excessive thermal stress, leading to harsh, burnt or bitter tones

This flavour is commonly found in dark beers, spirits (especially rum), coffee, and some aged soft drinks. Understanding the causes of molasses off-flavour is critical to preventing negative sensory impact in finished products.

How Do Molasses Flavour Standards Improve Sensory Training?

Molasses flavour standards help improve sensory training by providing a consistent, high-quality reference for identifying caramelised and burnt sugar notes. They train panellists to recognise and describe the flavour accurately across different beverage types. This enhances sensory memory, sharpens detection skills, and ensures a unified vocabulary within tasting teams. The standards also support quality control by highlighting off-flavours or process inconsistencies. Overall, they boost confidence and precision in professional sensory evaluations.

How to Recognise Molasses Flavour: Sensory Terms

Professionals often describe molasses flavour using the following sensory descriptors:

Burnt sugar
Dark caramel
Treacle
Brown sugar syrup
Toasted sweetness
Earthy bitterness
Charred sugar
Roasted syrup notes

These terms help create a shared sensory language across production and QA teams.

What Are the Professional Applications of the Molasses Flavour Standard?

The Molasses Flavour Standard supports a wide range of professional applications:

Brewers use it to monitor the impact of roasted malt and prevent excessive burnt-sugar character in dark beers.
Distillers and rum producers rely on it to calibrate barrel ageing, fermentation by-products, and caramelised sweetness.
Coffee roasters and cuppers use it to assess deep roast development and prevent bitterness from over-roasting.
Soft drink manufacturers use it to manage heat-processed sugar profiles and prevent unwanted burnt notes.
Quality control teams utilise it to establish detection thresholds and ensure batch consistency.
Sensory trainers and educators depend on it to deliver consistent, reproducible training across facilities.

Other Information

Pack Size: 5 capsules
Price: £75.00 GBP
Minimum Order Value: £275
Shipping: Global delivery available

Equip your sensory panel with the expertise to recognise and calibrate molasses flavours—an essential component of quality assurance and product development.

Order the Molasses Flavour Standard now.

FlavorActiV GMP Flavour Standards

Only Pharmaceutical Quality GMP Flavour Standards provide sufficient quality for professional sensory panels to train and validate with.

We produce encapsulated GMP (Pharmaceutical Good Manufacturing Practice) Flavour Standards that are safe to both smell and drink. The compounds within our capsules impart the aroma, taste and mouthfeel of a specific defect or positive flavour into a beverage for the purposes of taster training, calibration and quality control.

Our individual flavour GMP Flavour Standards are sold by flavour, each flavour pack contains 5 capsules, each separately blister packaged. Our sensory kits contain a mixture of flavours, each separately blister packaged, read the product description for flavour details.

We ship globally, and have over 20 years of experience at it. Our GMP Pharmaceutical Flavour Standards are produced to the highest standards, and as such, their shelf-life is strong and their quality consistent.

FlavorActiV’s flavour centre is the world’s only pharmaceutically run facility dedicated to the production of flavour reference standards. The Flavour Centre is a state-of-the-art facility housed within the campus of world-renowned Quay Pharma near Liverpool in the U.K.

The Flavour Centre was designed by FlavorActiV from the ground up at the direct request of global customers as they looked to move away from inferior food grade ‘certified flavour standards’ to GMP Pharma, a standard that ensures safe, stable, traceable, consistent and long shelf-life products.

All FlavorActiV’s industry-leading encapsulated flavour standards are manufactured following GMP at our Flavour Centre. All aspects of manufacture are overseen by Quay Pharma who are audited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.K. Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory agency (MHRA). We also welcome customer audits.

Only FlavorActiV GMP flavour standard capsules bear our mark of authenticity.

We brand each of our capsules so that our customers know they’re getting the Pharmaceutical GMP Quality that only FlavorActiV provide.

Industry leading packaging and shelf-life

FlavorActiV flavour standards are blister packaged, which extends shelf-life and protects capsules from potential contamination. The average shelf-life of FlavorActiV flavour standards is 18 months to 4 years, depending on the flavour compounds.

We will never ship in pots or plastic packaging, here’s why…

Blister packaging protects capsules from the environment until they are ready for use. Blister packaging greatly reduces the amount of headspace for possible flavour escape. As each capsule individually blister packaged, making use of one capsule still leaves all others protected. FlavorActiV Flavour Standard packaging is 100% recyclable, as opposed to polypropylene which is not widely recycled.

Pots are semi-porous, they allow molecules to pass through and flavour to be lost, their significant headspace also adds to substantial flavour escape as a gas, even when using just one capsule all those remaining in the pot are exposed.

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