Sensory in Beer Land!

Craft beer is a fickle mistress. Collectively, our industry is an amoeba of trends. An expanding and contracting blob of ideas and opinions. IPAs should be clear! The best IPAs are hazy! Adjunct lagers are garbage! Adjunct lagers are the next big thing! Other brewers are friends. Other brewers are the competition. As we negotiate through this landscape, let’s not forget one thing: how quickly things can and do change.

As an industry, we need to embrace this change. We need to understand that things are different now and there is no room for denying the obvious, that there are lots of craft breweries out there that make mediocre beer. So-so products that might make you intoxicated but will also make you regret it the next day.

Early on, things were very different. We could maybe get by with some slight quality off flavor errors because we barely knew what they were and what processes caused them. No one sat at our bars and complained about Eugenol levels in the barrel aged brown. Or the diacetyl levels in the cloudy pilsner.

Those days are gone. Our customers are not only more educated and experienced, they have adopted craft beer as a lifestyle. They are sensory certified. They know good from bad and they are not afraid to tell the world about it in a poolside post that reaches thousands.

We can run but we cannot hide from sensory in the 2020s. Now is the time to put our egos to the side, roll up our sleeves and learn. Learn the positive flavor attributes and their process sources. Learn off flavors and what their root process causes are. Learn how both good and bad appear in your core brands.

Defend your brewery's integrity with an established sensory program.

I'm Allison and you are in Beer Land.

,