Oxidised GMP Flavour Standard For Sensory Training

Oxidised GMP Flavour Standard For Sensory Training

The Oxidised GMP Flavour Standard is a sensory reference for professionals and enthusiasts to identify oxidation-related off-flavours in beer and other beverages. This product helps you train your sensory skills and improves your ability to recognise unwanted off-notes, such as flat, old, aged, grape-like, and sherry-like flavours, that occur when beer is exposed to oxygen.

The GMP-certified oxidised GMP Flavour Standard provides a controlled, repeatable benchmark that supports sensory calibration, panel training, and quality assurance across production environments.

£75.00 GBP

Quantity:

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

Minimum Order: £275

Oxidised GMP Flavour Standard Overview

Oxidised flavour refers to a group of undesirable aromas and tastes that develop when oxygen reacts with compounds in beer or beverages. These flavours are commonly described as:

  • Flat or stale
  • Old or aged
  • Grape-like
  • Sherry-like

Oxidation reduces freshness and vibrancy, masking desirable hop, malt, or fermentation characteristics. It is one of the most common and commercially damaging off-flavours encountered in packaged beverages.

What Causes Oxidised Flavour?

Oxidation typically occurs when:

  • Oxygen is introduced during packaging (bottling, canning, or kegging)
  • Dissolved oxygen levels are not adequately controlled
  • Seals, closures, or packaging materials allow oxygen ingress
  • Products are stored improperly or for extended periods

Chemically, oxygen triggers reactions that create free radicals. These reactions can both degrade fresh flavour compounds and accentuate specific sulphur-derived notes, resulting in characteristic oxidised off-flavours—often noticeable within weeks of packaging, particularly in lagers and delicate beer styles.

Using the Oxidised GMP Flavour Standard for Sensory Training

The oxidised GMP Flavour Standard is specifically designed for structured sensory training and calibration. It allows tasters to:

  • Experience oxidation in a controlled, repeatable format
  • Train recognition of early-stage oxidation
  • Improve consistency across tasting panels
  • Benchmark real samples against a known reference

By simulating realistic oxidation profiles, the standard helps sensory professionals build confidence and accuracy when evaluating freshness, stability, and shelf-life performance.

How to Recognise Oxidised Flavour: Sensory Terms

Common sensory descriptors associated with oxidised flavour include:

  • Oxidised beer
  • Flat
  • Old
  • Aged
  • Grape-like
  • Sherry-like

These descriptors are essential vocabulary for professional tasters and are reinforced through repeated use of the GMP Flavour Standard during training sessions.

What Are the Professional Applications of the Oxidised GMP Flavour Standard?

The Oxidised GMP Flavour Standard serves multiple professional applications:

  • Brewmasters and beer tasters use it to identify and quantify oxidation-related off-flavours, helping them assess packaging performance, oxygen control, and freshness across different beer styles, particularly lagers and delicate hop-forward beers.
  • Quality control and quality assurance teams rely on it to establish sensory acceptance thresholds, monitor batch-to-batch consistency, and detect early signs of oxidation before products are released to market.
  • Packaging and production specialists apply it to evaluate the impact of filling lines, closures, and packaging materials, supporting improvements in oxygen management and shelf-life stability.
  • Shelf-life and stability testing professionals use the standard to benchmark how oxidation develops over time, enabling informed decisions on storage conditions, distribution timelines, and best-before dating.
  • Sensory analysts and training coordinators employ it as a calibrated reference in sensory training programmes, ensuring consistent flavour recognition, panel alignment, and reliable sensory performance across teams, sites, and certification schemes within the beverage industry.

Other Information

Please note: This FlavorActiV GMP Flavour Standard is proprietary—a superior product from a quality testing perspective, designed to represent an off-flavour type that can occur in beer at a specific oxidation profile. Other flavours within our range can fit older oxidation profiles, such as Papery and Catty.

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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