About This Project

This is an article on taste science written by James, our resident Bar40 food scientist. The purpose of these articles are to give a strong scientific background in how humans perceive flavour and to bring practical concepts to what we experience with our drinks

Use this article as a tool, just like how you use Bar40 Bitters as a tool, to create purpose behind your cocktails.

 Mindfulness and Tasting: Part 1

So you’ve made a cocktail with Bar40 Bitters and it’s now time to sit back and enjoy it. After tasting it you notice the complexity of the flavours. What exactly are you tasting? Can you effectively describe it? In this post we’re going to talk about mindful tasting (actively tasting and experiencing flavours), using taste kits as a method to improve your palate, tasting capabilities, and technique.
Mindful tasting is the process of analyzing aromas and flavours as you continue to consume a food or drink. Making note of each flavour component you taste, its strength, and how it interacts with other flavours. Everyone has different taste sensitivities, and mindful tasting may come easier to some than others but as with any skill, practice is the key. By practicing mindful tasting whether that be with everything you eat and drink on a daily basis or using taste kits, you can slowly train your palate to recognize more flavours with the end goal of heightening your senses and tasting flavours that may have been muddled or lost before.
It’s important to remember that aromas play a large role in flavour perception so breathing through your nose before you taste a product and through your mouth as your tasting helps to trigger both nasal and orthonasal olfactory receptors. Once consumed it’s equally important to reach numerous taste buds which can be done by ensuring that the food being analyzed reaches not only the surface area of the tongue but the inside of the mouth as well.

Food and art is often compared due to their many similarities and just like analyzing a piece of art, tasting food and drink have several components and flavours that make up the big picture. To be able to breakdown, recognize, and pick out these flavours, it’s much easier if you already know how the basic flavours taste by themselves and can match a description to a flavour. To give an easy example that dissects a taste from a trigeminal sense, taste just capsaicin and then taste a jalapeno pepper. Marking the difference between these two is a good way to familiarize your palate with ‘heat’ is like, rather than making an association of a pepper taste to heat and vice versa.
This is where taste kits come into play, taste kits can be sold based on what you are tasting (i.e. beer, wine, coffee) or there are general kits also available on the market. These kits contain a large variety of flavour notes that you would expect to find in whatever product they are tailored to. It is then much easier to identify and be mindful of what you are tasting having the memory of specific flavours.
A simple test you can do at home with or without a taste kit to analyze your taste buds is called threshold testing. Threshold testing begins with a highly diluted solution, so dilute that it may just taste like water. The concentration is then increased after each taste until the solution intensity tastes the same to you no matter how much higher the concentration goes. To train your palate, it’s good to use a solution for each sense; using a simple sugar solution for sweet, table salt solution for salt, citric acid (lemon juice can be used as an alternative) for sour, and diluted bittering agent such as quinine for bitter. Umami is a little different story as it is quantified as the glutamate compounds found in food, high sources of this include tomatoes,mushrooms/truffles, and MSG (monosodium glutamate). For the purpose of threshold testing MSG would be a good compound to use as it is composed of salt and glutamates, while the salty taste will be present we typically have a higher threshold for glutamates and would be able to taste umami once the initial wave of salt passes. By quantifying these intensities individually, it leaves you with good reference points for anything you taste.

Another test that can be used is called triangle testing, this can be done using two solutions. Either using just one solution each or creating a mix making binary (two) solution flavours or tertiary (three) solution flavours once you’ve trained your palate to recognize more. The point of this test is being able to decipher similarities and differences, two cups would contain one solution while the last cup contains a different one. While tasting the samples at random, try to decide which one is different and why. Always be sure to cleanse your palate between tasting samples by drinking water and eating something bland like unsalted soda crackers. As we cleanse the palate it is also important to cleanse the olfactory senses which can be done by smelling unflavoured coffee beans. The same theory of practice can be done on a daily basis with everything you eat and drink. As all the flavours break down to the basic gustatory senses of bitter, sweet, salty, sour, and umami, thinking about these root flavours while actively tasting is the entire idea of mindful tasting. We can then broaden our senses if need be and pursue more distinct and complex flavours, but as long as we stay mindful, the flavour profile experience will always be heightened.

Becoming a better taster takes plenty of practice and great attention to detail. So the next time you pick up your glass or fancy-[ants cocktail coupe, remind yourself to think about what you taste, while you’re tasting it. Shout those flavours out loud to your bartender, I’m sure he or she will love you even more than they already do.

Happy mindful tasting.