Tasting and Designing Beer with Randy Mosher – BeerSmith Podcast #314
48:39 Share

Randy Mosher joins me this week to discuss the relationship between tasting and designing beer. This is Beersmith Podcast number 314.

This is the Beersmith Home Brewing Show, where brewing great beer is our passion. If you want to take your brewing to the next level, visit beersmith.com, where you can download a trial version of our Beersmith software, subscribe to the newsletter, and get dozens of free articles on home brewing. And now, your host and the author of Home Brewing with Beersmith, Brad Smith.

This is Beersmith Podcast number 313 and it's late November 2024. Randy Mosher joins me this week to discuss the relationship between tasting and designing beer. Thank you to this week's sponsors, Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine. They've recently launched an all-new experience called Craft Spirits and Distilling. If you make or love spirits, check out spiritsanddistilling.com for recipes, how-to videos, their Spirits and Distilling podcast, and much more. That new site is spiritsanddistilling.com.

And Beersmith Web, the online version of Beersmith's brewing software. Beersmith for the Web lets you design great beer recipes from any browser, including your tablet or your phone. Edit recipes on the go with access to the same full suite of recipe building tools as our desktop version. Try Beersmith Web today by creating a free account at beersmithrecipes.com.

And finally, a reminder to click that like and subscribe button on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, or whatever platform you're listening on. Clicking those buttons is a great way to support the show. And now let's jump into this week's episode. Today on the show, I welcome back Randy Mosher. Randy's the author of the books Mastering Homebrew, Radical Brewing, and Tasting Beer. He's also a partner at two breweries near Chicago, Five Rabbit and Forbidden Root.

Randy also has an upcoming book entitled Your Tasting Brain. Randy, it's always a pleasure to have you on the show. How are you doing today? I'm doing good, Brad. It's always great to be back chatting with you. So how are things going? I guess I should ask, how's the two breweries coming along? Well, Five Rabbits has been on hiatus. I'm not sure whether they're ever going to reopen or not. They were a little ambitious as far as

the size of brewery they wanted to open. And so they were always a little starved for cash. The plan, as I last heard it, was to reopen as a brew pub in the Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago, which is kind of the heart and soul of the Mexican community. For Bidden Root, we've got two breweries in Chicago and another one in Columbus. And we're just trying to get like everybody back up to kind of where we were pre-COVID. And, you know, it's coming. It's just slow. So.

But we're making some great beer. We have incredible food at all locations. So it's, you know, it's a quality place. So we're proud of what we're doing. That's awesome. Yeah. Just need the audience to follow along. Well, as, as you know, craft beer is a, had a bit of a bit of a turnaround the last year or so. Oh yeah. Probably as a result, probably partially because of COVID and possibly because changing tastes, I guess.

Right. Well, we're actually working on a tequila because my partners, you know, looked at the numbers and like that's growing and we're doing, you've taken our flavor expertise and making some flavored tequilas. So that's been an interesting project. That's cool. And of course your other, other project is the, the upcoming book, you're tasting brain. And I think you were, you were getting close to releasing it last time I talked to you, but you mentioned there's been some slip backs, I guess. Well, we're trying to, we're,

between me and the publisher, we're trying to really figure out how a book it can, and, uh, they're pushing smaller and I'm pushing bigger. And we're sort of in a, in a, um, a place where we've got to get that figured out. How many pages do you have at the moment?

Well, I don't know. It's somewhere around 600 right now. That's a weighty book. It's a beast. But, you know, Harold McGee does big books. There are big books out there on complex topics. So I'm just trying to cut as much technical stuff as I can without losing the story. So we'll see how it goes. But I'll be very happy to be done working on it. I'll tell you that. It's been six years. Wow. Yeah, that's a big one.

A few days ago, you sent me a quote that brewer's ability to taste represents a ceiling on how wonderful their beers can be. What do you mean by that quote?

Well, I think it's obvious kind of what it means, but I think the message is we don't really think about that enough. Your ability to really dig in and taste the nuances of a beer, to be able to detect problems, to evaluate your recipe choices and your process decisions, all that shows up in the taste. And really, it's a matter of training yourself on technique,

on understanding the vocabulary, understanding where flavor develops during the malting and brewing process and hot processing and all of that. So it's quite a complicated task, and it takes years of practice, and you can't just read a book and become good at it. It's almost...

something that you really just got to get your, get your nose in that glass and, uh, taste it and, and figure out, for example, like what acetaldehyde smells like to you. And then you got to connect it to whatever the standard industry vocabulary is, um, sort of two parts of that. But, uh, you know, if you're, if you're not, if you're not that good a taster, uh,

You never know how good your beers are or not. You know, you'll miss flaws. You'll miss, like, you lose that ability to make better decisions next time. Now, let's start with a discussion of smell. So we can all smell similar things, but our ability to smell and identify individual smells and visualize different smells varies quite a bit, right? Yeah.

It does. There's sort of two parts of smelling, and one is the physiological part, that is the sensitivity of our receptor cells to individual chemicals. And we're all a little different. We have some blind spots, some things like diacetyl, for example. About 10% have a significant blindness to diacetyl. And that's why judging is so helpful, because you can

sit in a competition. And if you're the only person at the table, not getting diacetyl, you know, like, Oh, I'm just not very strong a taster on diacetyl. Uh, but, uh, but the other part, and you can train to identify some of those compounds or to detect some of those compounds, you can gain a little bit of acuity through training.

But mainly, mainly that's fixed. You don't have a lot of ability to become like more absolutely sensitive. But what you do have the ability to do much better is to learn how to identify things, to learn how to identify them in context, you know, because again, that diacetyl is going to taste really buttery in a pale beer, but if you put it in a darker beer and it's going to taste more like pastry.

So you've got to learn that. And then you also need to learn whatever the common language is that we use within the brewing industry to talk to each other about these things, too. So you have to kind of find your own cues. Like if you think acetaldehyde smells like raw pumpkin, that's your internal cue. But in the brewing industry, we just call it acetaldehyde because it's such a specific chemical that comes from specific kind of fermentation characteristics.

Now you talk about the ability to imagine and visualize different smells. What does that mean? Well, this is something that's been debated in science for quite a while. And they used to really think that it wasn't really even possible to do that, that the brain doesn't really, they thought that the brain doesn't really have the ability to summon up a kind of an internal image of an aroma.

But it turns out that the people who are involved in day-to-day activities like perfumers and flavorists and brewers and winemakers, you know, they have that ability to do exactly that. And in fact, when you have developed this ability, it actually creates, lights up parts of your brain that are activated by smelling the actual smell.

And that's true of a lot of sensory things. Just the act of recalling something or imagining something triggers those same brain patterns that you get from an actual smell. And so the utility of that, of course, is pretty obvious. If you can create a virtual beer in your mind and understand your ingredients and understand recipes well enough,

then you basically can work that beer around in your mind and kind of create this model. And you can imagine it with a little more of a darker crystal malt or a little bit more of a more fruity hop or whatever it happens to be. And then you can

Once you have that picture in your head, then you can write a description and put down paper. Some of the characteristics that you want to control and start working out a recipe, you know, so it really starts with that imagining kind of process. And then rather than just like looking and looking, looking around the homebrew store, it's like, well, I don't know. I'll get some 40 level by crystal. Cause there it is, you know, and, and throwing a recipe together in a kind of a, uh,

Not a very thoughtful way. And not, you know, not that you can't make good beer that way, but if you're trying to do this with any kind of art, you really want to be able to communicate things with it. You really want to either be right in style or be right in style, but be a little bit like a more to the more malty side or more to the hoppy side or knowing, you know, how far you can go within a style before you're out of style.

And I think those things are really important. And we get sometimes, I think, so consumed with the technical details of water treatment and fermentation temperatures and all of that that we don't pay as much attention to the art side of it as I think we could. And I think it benefits everybody to do that.

Well, Randy, you talked a little bit about flavor and how important it is to understand the actual underlying flavor of ingredients like hops and malt and so on in your book, Mastering Homebrew. I was wondering if you could talk about that and how it's relating to your concept of virtual beer. Right. Well, I think, again, it's just part of what brewers need to master. And you really need to understand that.

how the flavors get where they are. And that's sort of two parts. One is how they get

you know, how they come from the field. Obviously that's really important for hops and the genealogy of hop varieties and how those originate, where they're grown, that sort of terroir aspect of it. And then how you, you know, how you put those to use. And the same with malt, although malt is very highly dependent on the way it's processed. And so if you look at malt,

the, it really is, uh, largely, uh, uh, about by yard flavors, which are those, um, uh, browning characteristics of cooked food. And that goes for the very palest malts all the way down to the blackest malts. Uh,

And then there's a second set of reactions that's similar to Maillard, but is not the same called caramelization. And that creates those sort of burnt sugar, toffee, raisin kind of notes that you get in caramel malts. And you really need to understand what those processes are. And it helps you kind of organize the vocabulary of those malts. And one of the things, for example, with darker malts is that

Dark malts, as they get darker and darker, when you hit up to about 80 degrees lava bond...

they become really unpleasant. And so they don't really sell malt in the range from about 80 to about 100 and well, about close to 200. Yeah. Because it's like this dead zone of horribleness. And, and what that means is like these things, these reactions called pyrolysis are taking over. Those are sort of like the, the burning reactions. Those are super harsh, super, super unpleasant. They don't, they make terrible beer. They're very,

uh, could be astringent and just like not really good. And the other thing is, is that,

So there's that to understand. But also as you get darker and darker, as you kill malt, it builds up more and more and more flavor. And then when you hit a certain point, you're actually losing flavor because of pyrolysis and those other, the continued heat and higher temperatures will actually burn off some of the flavors that were created earlier. And so despite the fact that

But black malts are incredibly potent in terms of their color. They're really mild, fairly mild, certainly for their color. And so they can be less flavorful than one would expect, certainly based on what the color is. And so I think getting a grip on that process and how those flavors develop. The other thing, of course, is just getting your hands on them.

We were looking to create some coffee beer and some chocolate beer and some other stouts. And so we sat down, me and my brewer and my partner sat down and we tasted through about 15 or 20 different kinds of black and chocolate malts. And we just basically made quickies.

Quick teas out of them, super concentrated tea, like 200 mils of water and 50 grams of malt, I think. Yeah, there's actually an ASBC method you can look up. It's called the malt sensory, ASBC malt sensory system, which allows you to do exactly what you're describing, make a little tea out of the malt. Yeah, you just put them into kind of a generic...

lager, craft lager, or whatever you want to do. You can put it in anything, really. But you just put in enough to kind of color it the way you want to color it and get some flavor out of it. It's not very scientific, but what is scientific is just the act of going through it and smelling it and tasting it and trying to record your impressions. Because we found some malt that tasted like...

really nice couverture chocolate from Europe. We found some other malt that tasted like kind of crappy, crappy, uh,

American milk chocolate. We found ones that were like espresso, ones that were like stale diner coffee. So there was quite a range in there. And it wasn't obvious by the color of it or the descriptor like chocolate versus black malt. So that was kind of a revelation. And then we just basically recorded all our impressions and put it in a Word doc. And we've got that on hand.

Uh, we've done that. I've done that with homebrewers at, uh, in, uh, with crystal malt too. And again, you just make up, make some malt teas and you can, uh, even, or even if you just like have the malt in little cups and pick it up and taste, just chew on a couple of grains. Yeah.

the flavor really comes through in those and it doesn't have to be anything super complicated makes for a nice homebrew thing and then you take record everybody's impressions and now you can have that back to the club it's like oh yeah this one really tastes like figs and this one tastes more like burnt marshmallows and

Because every manufacturer does those crystal malts a little bit differently, and they're very secretive about it. So you can't really ever get a lot of information about the maltsters or about the way they process those caramel and honey malts. So you really have to learn those on your own one by one. And it's well worth doing. Some of the maltsters have started publishing sensory charts, you know, those spider web charts, much like you see for hops, I think, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, and those are great. The hop, that is a really great tool for hops because they just split those radar charts or spider charts into...

eight, usually about eight or 10 different things. And there's qualities like cream caramel that you wouldn't like, really, is that in hops? But that's, that's like one of their sensory descriptors. And so they help, they kind of are, they operate one, they're informational about the hops, but they're also kind of a checklist for you.

uh, as you get to know hops and to start to think about them and, and, and smell them to like, remember to look for, you know, the earthy and the woody and the cream caramel and, and, uh, you know, some of the more obvious ones like, um, herbal and, and, uh, things like that. So, so there's a lot of work to be done that doesn't involve brewing beer. And then of course you can, like, if you get some experience with certain hops that have certain qualities, when you rub them, um,

then they're going to be somewhat different in a brew where you use them in a kettle, and they're going to be different again when you use them in dry hopping because, again, that's different. But the dry rub is kind of the standard, right? Because I've done it before, too, where you sit down with a whole bunch of hops and dry rub it and get a real good sensory panel. You get an idea, certainly, what the aroma that's coming from the hops is. No question. No question about it.

One of the things I like to do at craft beer conferences, get, get my brewer and, uh, we just go around, go to pop union or whoever it is now, uh, Yakima chief and, uh, some of the other hop companies and just like, okay, what's new. Let's taste these experimental ones. Let's taste the new ones and make some notes. And then every year we have another pile of new hops and, uh, sometimes taste some older ones too, just to kind of keep the, keep the list fresh.

So really lots of cool things you can do like that. Chris White was mentioning, I had him on the show a couple of weeks back and he mentioned that they're starting to do some of that same sort of thing with yeast.

They're actually starting to put together, um, if you will, spider charts for yeast, uh, with the various yeast flavors that come out of it. Yeah. Well, they know that, you know, they know the genomics of yeast within this, this, this, um, characteristics I call metabolomics, which is basically all of the metabolic pathways that are coded for in the DNA. Um, they can correlate those to, uh, organic acids or, um,

or really like ester creation, and ester creation is really a product of alcohol plus alcohol.

plus organic acids, which is in the raw material, what you're starting with. So they can do some of that on just a theoretical basis and then, of course, come in. I think he does a lot of that on measurements. I think they actually measure things like the acetyl aldehyde and the esters and the other things coming off the finish. They brew a modest beer in the right style or whatever, but they're able to measure it and then get an idea of what the flavor profile generated by the yeast and

He also, as you know, has a brewery where he generates, he'll take the same wort and put multiple yeasts into it so they get multiple flavors.

Beer is out of the same wort, if you will, and you can see the impacts. Those are a lot of fun to go to. I've been to the one in Asheville. So if you're anywhere near San Diego or Asheville, highly, highly, highly recommend getting to White Labs and taste some beers. It's kind of a revelation, really, how, I mean, we all know this inherently, but when you get two beers in the glass that are really well made, exactly the same except for yeast, it really is pretty instructive.

I agree, yeah. But it is nice because we're getting more and more tools as we go. Absolutely. You know, you get hops, grains, yeast, better understanding of how those things all play together. Yeah. But they also, you know, all that, you can measure stuff with chromatography, but at the same time, human panels are still really useful. Yeah. Because the chemistry doesn't tell the story the same way that we interpret it.

So my next question, how do you translate these various, let's say I've got a good model of what, I don't know, an average hops smells like, a mosaic or something like that. And I've got it, yeah, I've done a sensory panel. I have a good idea. But how does that actually translate into the finished beer? And the same thing for malt, the same thing for yeast. Well, it's the processes, you know. I mean, it's basically, you know, you're going to put your malt together and the mix of specific grains that you use are going to come out.

you know, as a, as sort of a combination, you know, one of the things that I found out by looking up all this science to do the new book is that how, how tightly integrated different components of, of, of a product like a beer or a wine can really be in, in wine. For example, a typical wine will have about two dozen esters,

But they all sort of, you can't pick them out individually, except maybe sometimes for isoamyl acetate, which is that kind of banana note. But most of them are very hard to individually pick out because they work together in what scientists call configural perception. And so that you can actually take out half the esters in a wine, in a, like a model wine,

And the ester profile is exactly the same. So it's very difficult to shift that ester profile. And it turns out, you know, from talking to the hop people, that the terpene, terpenoid component of hop, which is really the main aromatic component, that that probably works that way too.

And in fact, they think that the quality of hoppiness itself, what we think of, what we call spicy, you know, we use this code word when we don't have a better descriptor and we just call hops like a Sot's hop. We just call it spicy. But all that means is hoppy. And that, they think, is a configurable smell made up of a whole bunch of terpenoids and some other things that are in there because...

None of those terpenoids smell exactly like hops. But when you put a bunch of them together, and there's like hundreds and hundreds of them in hops, you put them all together and you get hoppiness. And then with some of those hops that have more pronounced amounts of, say, geraniol, you get that kind of like rose-like or kind of a little bit of a pungent.

Yeah, like a pungent floral, like a really like literally smelling a geranium sometime, like a cascade, like the sea hops have a lot of that in them. And then the other the other the other hop types, the newer types that have a lot of those files of sulfur compounds that give you like grapefruit, tropical, all that kind of stuff. Those those those flavors are.

Those aromas are really strong individually, but they also are strongly potentiating for other characteristics like fruit. And so there's a lot of interactions there.

that occur in these things. But essentially, you're taking your hop profile and trying to shove it a little bit more to one side or a little to another. You want to go the citrusy route. You want to go the classic West Coast seahop route. And so you have a little bit

of room of room to kind of push the center around, but you don't really, you can't like pick it up and put it down and create something completely different. Interesting. It just doesn't, it just doesn't really work that way. Well, and another, another effect that I was discussing with Chris White, we were talking about blending yeast and he mentioned that, you know, in most cases or in a lot of cases, when you blend two yeast, the, the, it does kind of what you would expect the, the two, two yeast kind of, you know, the yeast flavors kind of, kind of meld together.

He said, but there's other cases where they simply don't. Like if you take a phenolic yeast and blend it with a non-phenolic yeast, you're still going to get a phenolic beer, right? You're going to get phenol. So yeah, there's some flavors that are clearly dominant no matter what you do. And then there's others that are really a blend. And I think that's probably true for many of the other ingredients as well. Yeah, it is. And it's also true of all flavors.

that a lot of the off flavors really stand out from, but not, in fact, not only do they stand out as their own separate things, but they have the ability to minimize the smells, uh, that are positive smells. So they can really interfere, uh,

You know, with like diacetyl will just sort of kill the pale malt because really it sort of takes your attention away. Some of the like musty smells actually get inside the mechanism of the receptor cells and throw a wrench in it. But it's interesting to those off flavors. They all have a threshold, right?

Everything has a threshold. Right. So I mean, if it's below the threshold, it's like, ah, no big deal. But then all of a sudden it's above the threshold and now you get a real problem. Well, actually with a lot of those things, the damage is done before you can actually taste it.

Before, up below, there's a lot more activity that goes on below threshold than we generally think. And we use that when we're at Forbidden Root, when we're making fruit beers or subtle herb, like botanical beers, using herbal ingredients. We don't really want people to be able to pick them out.

We're trying to create an effect like we use iris root in a pilsner and a couple other florals. And the idea is not to make it taste like iris root.

But the idea is just to push that hop character off center a little bit into a more kind of fruity floral aspect than we would be able to do with hops alone. Right. So there's a lot of really clever and interesting things you could do when you start thinking that threshold isn't everything. Right. Threshold is just where it sort of pops above the background and you really can't avoid it. But there's a lot of activity that goes on in very subtle ways.

at half threshold or maybe even a little below. So threshold is just a line. It's just a number. And it's not always what you might think. So how can we go about really improving our mental models, whether it's the ingredients or the overall finished beer? I think it's that. It's basically learn your ingredients, practice it, and just think about, can I imagine a beer?

And then the other way, sort of the flip side of the same skill is being able to taste a beer that somebody else made and then see if you can deconstruct it back into its original recipe. If you can do the one, you can do the other. So it may be easier just to, when you're out drinking, imagine like, okay, here, I'm smelling this, I'm tasting this, this is the overall characteristics of this beer. And

could you create a recipe that would get you there? You know, people do it with food all the time, right?

I find it's hit or miss on the reverse engineering, if you will. You know, there's like certain hops I can go, okay, yeah, I know what that is right away. Like Northern Brewer, for example, is very distinctive to me. Yeah. But there's others that are just, you know, I just can't, really can't tell. Yeah. I mean, some people will like, oh, yeah, I can tell there's a little, that's mosaic and there's a little bit of a Zaka and whatever. But it really like...

Our brains don't work that way. Yeah. And there's 600 terpenoids and maybe 30 of them are important and they're all going to blend together the way they blend. And, you know, you're not really going to preserve the individual hop character identity unless it's something very distinctive and

like the, those ones with the sulfur compounds that, that have those sort of, you know, like that grape quality or the, or the cat pee quality or whatever, those, those do tend to stand proud and there's certain ones. It's just like the sommeliers, you know, the, when they do their blind tasting, they have a grid of grape varieties and they just look at, well, this one has this, this one doesn't have this. And, and they kind of learn the matrix of what should be in what

what grape and then they're looking for these varietal characteristics that are you know the green pepper green bell pepper type of smell or whatever you only get those in certain varieties and so they kind of use it to winnow down and it's sort of like we can do a little bit the same thing with beer well of course there's there's some amazing blended wines as you know my favorite kinds actually um

So a lot of us get into reverse engineering. I know early in my brewing career, I was really into trying to duplicate some commercial beers that were available, particularly from England. How can you do that? How can you get as close as possible? Let's say I want to brew, I don't know.

a Bass Ale or an Irish Stout, a Guinness Stout or whatever, whatever it is? Well, first of all, you can do some research and, uh, and see what, see if you can find some information about what they actually do use. And, uh, second, you can, you know, you can actually, if you want to go for Bass Ale, you could try the pale ale malt from various, uh, English maltsters and, you know,

Do some simple little taste trials with top with Maltese and see which one gets you there and do a little brewing trials. Those are not super complicated trials.

recipes for the most part. And then of course, you probably remember that brewing beers like those you buy from back in the day from Dave line. Sure. I think I still have a copy of the book. Actually, that was the first homebrew I ever got. I'm looking at this like treacle. What is treacle? And like, and all these beers I'd never heard of and we'll never be able to taste. And yet there was information in there. So you got to like, see what real actual information you can find.

And I'm not sure how incredibly accurate some of the recipes were, but. Oh, I know. I wouldn't necessarily, especially on modern standards, but you know, sometimes you get, sometimes there's people who travel and they talk to brewmasters and there's little tidbits of information out there on the internet. So you can do that, but then also you just like get stuff and taste it, you know? And we do a lot of like when we make beers, one of the things we do, excuse me for a new beer,

that maybe we're going to add some fruit to or whatever, is we do blending between, we'll buy maybe four or five different commercial beers that maybe one has the color, one has the bitterness, one has the gravity, and we'll start blending things together and keep track of that. And then we can go back and reconstruct based on, oh, it's 34% of this and

60% of this and whatever it happens to be. And then we can calculate based on what we, um, know the original gravity or alcohol content is what maybe the, the, um, hot bitterness may be out published out there for the various beers or maybe what the hot varieties are. And so you can kind of just do a little bit of that. And, uh, that's a, that's a fun way to kind of make new beers that, um, you know, it's not foolproof, but it gets you kind of neighborhood, um,

Better than just starting from a blank piece of paper. Yeah. And then, of course, the other thing I'm always amazed is that the export beer is never quite the same as the one at home, right? Like I went to Prague recently and the beer in Prague was just, I mean, just out of this world, you know. But of course, it's all fresh, right? Well, yeah. The old trope was, oh, they brew different beer over there.

You know, for their market than for America. They brew crappy beer for America. It's like, no, it's two months, you know, it's two months in transit. And if you know anything about those pale lager beers, about three weeks out, you can start to tell if they're, you know, they're putting on a little age. You know, New Belgium had their panels trained, probably still do, to taste the difference between fat tire that day, canned that day, or a week old.

You know, that's how fast it goes. We were at a brewing event out in the West Coast and Vinny actually served from Russian River, actually served this beer that was bottled that morning, which I thought was pretty cool for his lunchtime talk. Yeah. It's hugely important. I think like most, it's sort of not on most beer drinkers radar because how would you ever find again or any of those brands? Because they just, you know, they just have lost a lot coming over the ocean.

Um, along those lines, how can we detect if something's actually missing from a finished beer? Is there a way to, you know, can you actually imagine things that are, that are not there that should be? Well, I guess that gets kind of what your concepts of what is the idea for this beer? And I'm, am I really paying this off? You know, at Five Rabbit, we met every Friday and we tasted everything new that week and we would compare it to the label copy.

you know, that said it's this and it's that, and it's the other thing. And we would all, every week we'd have to say, okay, do we, is this beer better than what the label is? Do we have to change the label or do we have to change the beer? You know? So, so that was a really good exercise to be able to do. Interesting. And I mean, are you, have you been able to do that? Have you been able to go, Oh, you know, this needs a little bit of this.

Kind of a thing? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can, you know, certainly you can really easily evaluate things like the overall balance, say. And if you're trying to make a coffee beer, you know, there's like that sharp espresso kind of character. There's sometimes maybe a bit of mocha character. And, you know, you may just feel that your trial batch just doesn't

either lacks enough coffee character or the coffee character is not exactly the right character. Maybe you can put a little like carafo dark malt into it to kind of just bring up a little bit more of the background roastiness of it to help support the coffee that's sitting on top. You know, it's one of those skills that you pick up as a cook. You

you know, a home cook or a professional chef just to be able to taste something. It's like, oh yeah, it needs a little bit of vinegar or something just to give it a little snap. So you got to kind of be looking for the, those big picture aspects, like the overall balance, the overall like presentation. Is it like,

Refreshing enough? Is it rich enough? Yeah, that's what I was going to ask about. How do you deal with intangibles, things like balance, complexity, depth, imbalances? Yeah, I mean, they're impossible to define. Even quality, when you take away...

Freedom, when you, if you get beyond freedom from problems, defining quality really is impossible. And everybody agrees, like the wine industry, everybody knows that quality is important and they sell wine based on quality, but nobody can identify what it actually is. It's completely intangible.

And so it's something different to everybody's for some people, the more you pay for it, the higher the quality must be. There you go. You know, so there's like, that's the psychology of that. You know, they get a lot of, uh, and, and beers do the same thing. You know, people who make famous barrel aged bourbon and barrel aged beers, they sell more Pilsner because they, that just the reputation kind of, uh, um, lifts, lifts all boats in their, in their portfolio.

So it's tricky territory. I mean, it really is in psychology and not in the senses so much. Well, we talked a little bit about taste and smell, but how does multi-sensory considerations come into play, especially when you're designing a beer? Well, when the senses get into the brain, they pause just for one synapse, and then they rapidly start combining together. So as a taster, it's always really important to try and

try and separate them you know when you're when you're really trying to give a critical tasting to something and if you pick up a glass of of wine for example and your first thought is oh it smells sweet you got to catch yourself there because there's no such thing as a sweet smell there's only a sweet taste but we associate fruit and sweet so tightly in our brain that um that that

Our brains just go there because our brains are just wired to be multimodal. And the same with hops. One of the pre-judge, the judge orientation session that they did at Great American Beer Festival years ago, the presenter put two beers in front of everybody and asked people to say which one is more bitter. And they were exactly the same bitterness, but the other one had twice as much hop oil in it.

And so it was like pretty, pretty instructive for people because we just, again, it's very hard. Your brain just wants to do that for us. So it's very hard to pull that apart. So you have to be really conscious. And then also on the other hand, you can use that from a flavor point of view. You know, if you want a beer to be, if you want a fruit beer to be

to present is really kind of like a sweet fruitiness, you know, you've got to really pay attention to the, um,

to the aromas to get enough fruitiness in there. You may want to use a yeast that's going to generate a good fruity profile to get underneath that. You may want to throttle back the bitterness a little bit because that's going to cut down on the sweetness. You know, so you really have to think about them as flavor, which is the combination of taste, mouthfeel, and smell. And because that's the product and that's how people are going to perceive it,

And although it's really useful as a taster to be able to pull them apart, because we want to try and be analytical as best we can, but knowing that it's all going to be together, especially in the brains of the people who are going to be drinking it. They're not going to really pull that apart like somebody with some experience or a brewer would do. What advice do you have for homebrewers that are looking to get better at recipe design and also judging beer? Well, judging, you just got to do it.

And I, and I, you know, most, most homebrew competitions are always looking for judges. Uh, if they're not looking for judges, they're looking for stewards. So if you're a little bit, um,

trepidatious and unsure of your own capabilities, sign up as a steward, you're just shuttling beers back and forth to the table, but often in homebrew competitions, they'll let the stewards kind of taste along a little bit, or they can go in the back room and pour a little sample and see what the judges are talking about, and you learn that way. And then you get on those panels, and you're spending all morning with two or three other people at the table, and they may have, they certainly have different

sensitivities than you do. They may have more experience. They may be more familiar with the vocabulary. So I would say anybody who wants to make better beer, get out there and judge them because, and then also, you know, you'll learn what people are looking for.

you know, what the judges consider quality beer, how they look at judges relative to the style descriptors that are, you know, the guidelines that the competitions are based on. So there's that aspect of it also. And, you know, learn what beers tend to be perceived the best relative to style guidelines. Like, for example, you know,

What was that? Great Lakes Brewery in Cleveland. Yeah. They were famous for identifying the upper outer edge of the style guideline for any given category. So their Edmund Fitzgerald Porter, it's barely a porter. One of my favorites, actually. It's a delicious beer, but it is just any more bitter or stronger than...

It would be out of style. It's robust. I would say it's robust. So it's just at the edge. And that generally, guess what? Brewers like that intensity, you know? Although it's hard to play that game with a culture. Yeah. So it doesn't work for every situation. But yeah.

You know, yeah, definitely get out there. It's fun. You meet people, you spend all morning with them or all afternoon and you get to, you know, every time you sit down, it's a different bunch of people and, you know, you really get develop that relationship.

that group and a community. And then if you are interested in, in learn, you know, really getting your BJCP certification, there's often study groups going around where people will, uh, do get the spike chemical sets and, uh, or just sit down and taste beers in different styles and talk about them over a period of, uh, some months. So that's another way. It's super fun. Great way to have conversations with people, um,

You know, there have been articles about men and about how they have a difficult time just like making friends and becoming parts of a group. And one of the statements that they made is like, women talk face to face, but men talk shoulder to shoulder.

Meaning they can talk about other things as long as they're like building a barn or doing something, you know, you know what I'm saying? So it's kind of one of those. And it's kind of true. Yeah. And there are like women get involved with this too. I'm not making it about men because it's, that's one of the nice things over the last 10 or 15 years is that how many, how many women are, uh,

involved in brewing and judging and all of that. So, but, but that's, you know, it's just a great way to, to meet people and kind of explain your community. And the other half of that, I want to ask about your recipe design. We talked quite a bit about judging, but what about recipe design?

Well, I think, yeah, I mean, it's just trial and error. And again, you can do those little blend up things and see what you like and then try and reproduce that. That's kind of a fun way to sit down with a half a dozen beers and just blend some things up until you get something that's like, yeah, I like the way that tastes. And now how can I do that? And reverse engineering as much as you can. Again, it's not foolproof, especially when it gets to ops. But

And, you know, anything you can do just to learn technically what you're doing, what mash temperature, like all the, you know, beer has so much process and it's all important. And really it's like, I think one of the other things that is helpful is maybe write up a description.

Like, what am I trying to do here? Like, like, let's not just start throwing malts in, but what, what's the effect I want to achieve? Like with my breweries, I just write label cup and you know, it's two, three sentences. And like, you're basically your elevator pitch for this beer, you know, is it a creamy cream ale? Is it like, what is it? What's your, what are you trying to achieve? And then everything do you do to achieve that effect?

Because it's like, you got to make all these decisions and you don't, it's hard to make them willy nilly or just each one separately on its own because they all contribute to what the, what the final thing is going to be. And so I think you need to start thinking more, more from that, that purpose. Like what is, what is, what am I trying to achieve here? And then make all your selections of your malts and your process and your temperatures and your pHs and everything and fermentation and

to achieve that particular desired effect. And I think you'll have a lot better, better results, uh, doing that. Well, Randy, uh, we're coming to the end here, but I wanted to ask you, uh, I think, so your book is still a TBD, but, uh, you, you did mention, I think that you generated a new website where people can learn more. Yeah, it's still randymoser.com, but I got a whole, a whole new website. It's phone friendly. It's the whole, you know, it's the latest and greatest. Um,

And I am really in the process of putting together newsletters. I've been cutting some content out of the book, and I got a lot of juicy little tidbits that are just not going to make the cut, but I'm going to start sending that out. I also did some really interesting interviews with some people in the flavor industry and the beer industry, and so I'm going to have those up. So if anybody wants to get onto my mailing list,

just go to randymoser.com and there's a place you can click through. And if you ever want to reach out to me for whatever reason, I'm easy enough to get through that site. So, you know, love hearing from you. The book is coming, probably be a year, but things move slow at big organizations. And I want to get your closing thoughts on this whole idea of sensory taste and how it relates to beer recipe design.

Well, that's what it's for, right? It is the purpose of this thing is to create an impression on people. You know, it's really a kind of applied psychology, like all art is, that you as the creator are trying to create something that kind of crosses over that bridge between two human beings and creates some effect, some emotional effect on people. And I think that's really the fundamentals of what it is. It's what's always been.

uh, since the earliest days is that the beer is something that people love that makes us happy, uh, that builds community. And, uh, I think if you hang onto that and just start tearing into the process and the ingredients and everything, eventually you'll get where you want to be. Something, something people can bond over, right? Absolutely. Something we all can agree on. Yes. Well, Randy, uh, thank you so much for coming on the show. Really appreciate you being here today.

Sure, Brad. I appreciate it. Always great talking to you. And my guest today is Mr. Randy Mosher, author of Mastering Homebrew, Radical Brewing, the book Tasting Beer, and the upcoming book, Your Tasting Brain. Thank you again, Randy. My pleasure.

Well, a big thank you to Randy Mosher for joining me this week. Thanks also to Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine. They recently launched an all-new experience called Craft Spirits and Distilling. If you make or love spirits, check out spiritsanddistilling.com for recipes, how-to videos, their Spirits and Distilling podcast, and much more. Again, that new site is spiritsanddistilling.com.

And Beersmith Web, the online version of Beersmith Brewing Software. Beersmith for the Web lets you design great beer recipes from any browser, including your tablet or phone. Edit recipes on the go with access to the same full suite of recipe-building tools as our desktop version. Try Beersmith Web today by creating a free account at beersmithrecipes.com.

And finally, a reminder to click that like and subscribe button on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, or whatever platform you're on. Clicking those buttons is a great way to support the show. I'd like to thank you for listening, and I hope you have a great brewing week.