Fun new experience at the local brewery today

[swenocha]

Our local brewery, Mantra Artisan Ales, produces some top quality beers, and besides their base beers, they are especially focused on some fantastic funky and sour beers. I was invited today to participate in a tasting panel, focused on determining the blend of their upcoming Cassis release. It was a very fun day, and it sounds like it's going to be something that I can continue to participate in in the future...

The tasting/blending consisted of the following seven beers pulled from the various fermenters, foeders, or barrels:

1) Flanders red on Oak for 12 months
2) Flanders red on Oak for 9 Months
3) 7 bbls of flanders red on 500lbs of black currant
4) 7 bbls of flanders red on 500lbs of tart cherries
5) Flanders red on Antebellum Arrington Vineyard barrels for 12 months
6) Flanders red on Antebellum Arrington Vineyard barrels for 9 months
7) 1.5 bbls of Mother beer (Flanders red) made to be acedic and sour



Our goal was to taste and rate each beer to our taste using a spider diagram. The categories to rate each were:

• Sweet

• Fruity

• Smokey

• Woody

• Body

• Mousey

• Estery

• Horse Blanket

• Leather

• Lactic Acid

• Acetic Acid

• Buteric Acid

• Malty

• Cheerios

• Blue Cheese

• Sulphury

After making our spider diagram for each of the seven component beers, we rated them from 1-7 based on our preference. Then we worked on what our blend preference would be, thinking about the strengths of each beer and the flavors they bring to the table. For this beer, we were told that the cassis and cerise variants should be dominant, and that the mother beer should be used in moderation. Otherwise, we were free to develop whatever blend we wanted. Once we settled on our percentages, we used the test tubes and wine thief to measure out our ingredients, and proceed to blend a 50ml pour. This pour was tasted by the group, with the brewmaster taking notes and giving a rating. My blend was rated cassis heavy and sour.



If I built it again, I would have upped the Antebellum contributions to cut the sour and up the barrel, but I was relatively happy with my first official blend. We continued to play with ratios after our official blends were scored, adding touches of this and touches of that to try to get it the way you liked it best. There are no wrong answers, but they are looking for people that can pick out certain flavors, so each taster is also rated. The rank of the tasters is important to their judgment of the final blend. As I get more experience, my score/weight may or may not adjust... we'll see how future tastings go.

All in all, a super fun day. I hope to have many more attempts in the future. The final blend of this beer releases at their upcoming block party, and will be submitted to the GABF. Will be interesting to see how the final version measures to the versions we tasted today.

[Beer-lord]

Sounds like a lot of fun to me. Sorry you had to sit thru all of that!

[Dawg LB Steve]

Sounds like a lot of fun to me. Sorry you had to sit thru all of that, ALONE without any of us!

Fixed that for you Paul!!!

[Inkleg]

Thanks for fixin that Steve.

What a great experience Chuck that just sounds AWESOME!!

[RickBeer]

What does "horse blanket" taste like? Being I don't live in the South, I'm not familiar with that taste.

[John Sand]

Sounds like a fascinating day. I would have declined, as sours upset my stomach. But it would be cool to be in a tasting panel at a brewery.
None of the images show on my screen, possibly because I resist updates.

[mashani]

What does "horse blanket" taste like? Being I don't live in the South, I'm not familiar with that taste.

Buy a bottle of Orval Trappist. The bottle will look like a bowling pin. Drink that. Then you will know.

What I want to know is what is "Mousey"?

[RickBeer]

Sounds delightful. I don't drink those types of beers.

[Kealia]

That sounds like such a fun day, happy for you Chuck!

[evily]

That sounds really cool!

I'm always amused by some of the flavor/aroma descriptors used in professional beer tasting. During my onboarding training week at MillerCoors, all of us new hires took a class in beer tasting, and they provided us with a tasting wheel that has some very interesting terminology on it. There are the expected terms like "malty" "citrusy" "grapefruit" "biscuity". But then there are terms like "catty" "shrimp-like" "cooked onion" and "garlic" on the flavor wheel and I'm just like . If my beer tastes "shrimp-like", I think we have a problem! And what does "catty" even taste like? Is it like "mousey"???

[FedoraDave]

First, Chas, that sounds like a great day of beer tasting, although I'm not big on sours. I'd love for my daughter to try some, though; she digs 'em.

Evily, catty is, to my understanding, an overuse of citrus hops. Smells like a cat's litter box that should have been changed about a week ago. I'm not crazy about real citrusy beers, although a balanced beer with citrusy hops is very refreshing (and my signature APA used both Simcoe and Amarillo, and there's citrus there).

I recall attending the AHA Homebrewers Conference in 2013. Great beers every place you turned, from craft breweries to homebrew clubs. One of the samples I had from a homebrew club was, I'm sorry to say, undrinkable. The aroma of cat urine was overwhelming, and the taste was just nasty to me. It's the only beer sample I had there that I had to dump out.

My daughter helped edit and proof the US version of The Beer Book, published by Doring Kindersley, and she came across "horse blanket" as a descriptor. Apparently, for farmhouse ales and some saisons, it's not a bad thing. The vegetable aromas and flavors, though, are more likely a product of infection, too-high fermentation temperature, or other bad things. I mean, who wants a beer that smells and tastes like cooked cabbage?

[evily]

Evily, catty is, to my understanding, an overuse of citrus hops. Smells like a cat's litter box that should have been changed about a week ago. I'm not crazy about real citrusy beers, although a balanced beer with citrusy hops is very refreshing (and my signature APA used both Simcoe and Amarillo, and there's citrus there).

I recall attending the AHA Homebrewers Conference in 2013. Great beers every place you turned, from craft breweries to homebrew clubs. One of the samples I had from a homebrew club was, I'm sorry to say, undrinkable. The aroma of cat urine was overwhelming, and the taste was just nasty to me. It's the only beer sample I had there that I had to dump out.

My daughter helped edit and proof the US version of The Beer Book, published by Doring Kindersley, and she came across "horse blanket" as a descriptor. Apparently, for farmhouse ales and some saisons, it's not a bad thing. The vegetable aromas and flavors, though, are more likely a product of infection, too-high fermentation temperature, or other bad things. I mean, who wants a beer that smells and tastes like cooked cabbage?

Very interesting, Dave! That makes sense about term "catty" (and I wish our beer flavor wheel had detailed descriptions like this, because many of the terms are quite ambiguous or at least not obvious). I intend to get my certification in beer tasting one of these days (once I am no longer considered a new hire, and have gotten some projects under my belt), and will eventually learn what all these strange terms really mean. In the mean time, I will just have to use my imagination when trying to figure out what a horse blanket actually tastes like.

[bpgreen]

Catty is not a good thing.

There are certain hops that have an aroma that some people perceive as smelling like cat urine. Apparently, it's more common for people who have (or have had) cats. It's also most often present in hops that have an aroma that is described as black currant.

I've got a fairly poor sense of smell, but I'm sensitive to the catty aroma, at least in some hops. I've read that it can be there in citra, but I don't detect it there (but citra seems to have a pretty wide variety of aromas, so it may be more pronounced in some batches than others).

I stay away from strisselspalt and most other hops that have black currant in their description.

[swenocha]

There... fixed the images. They showed up for me in Chrome, but not Tapatalk.

As for mousey... they are talking THP.

Sent from my SM-G930P using Tapatalk

[mashani]

There... fixed the images. They showed up for me in Chrome, but not Tapatalk.

As for mousey... they are talking THP.

Sent from my SM-G930P using Tapatalk

I thought THP was the cheerios. Or is it both depending on amount?