Off-Flavor Workshop: Photos, Wrap-Up and Materials

We held our Off-Flavors in Beer Workshop last Tuesday night. I did a brief write up with photos and a link to the materials on my blog   We had 18 attendees and  8 CHAOSers (Jon Phillips, Brandon Kessler, Americo Ochoa, Patty McGuire, Melissa Hiller, Ben Resch, Hugh Vondracek and Dave Williams).  The blog post is copied below:

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A fellow BJCP national judge, Kyle Nordquist, and I organized and presented an off-flavors in beer workshop earlier this week.  We presented 12 off-flavors, using a Siebel off-flavor kit, to 18 workshop attendees in a very cool setting - Lo-Rez Brewing's taproom.

Each vial was mixed with a liter of the base beer.  We used Corona as our base, because one of the workshop attendees is gluten intolerant and she tolerates Corona, which is apparently low enough in gluten to be considered gluten free.  

We started by briefly discussing how we taste beer - that it involves both stimulation and our perceptions and how our processes for aroma are much more complex than for flavor.  We went over a bit of vocabulary, then tasted the base beer without any additions and discussed what we were perceiving in the aroma and flavor.  Attendees always had some of the undoctored base beer in front of them, so they could recalibrate if they were having a difficult time picking up the aroma or flavor.  

For the off-flavors, we  doctored a liter of beer in a pitcher with an off-flavor vial, mixed, then poured into individual servings of about 2 ounces  We'd encourage folks to describe what they were smelling first, then what they were tasting.  Then, using the materials I prepared, we'd discuss the off-flavor, its chemistry, and its causes.

You can view which off-flavors we used and the materials we put together here. For best viewing, download and open in Word.  

Attendees seemed to be interested in the idea that different flavors are perceptible at different levels to different people.  Many also seemed to be surprised that those levels can be very different in the aroma versus the flavor.  y our local brewery, Lo-Rez.  Big thanks to Dave and Kevin for opening th taproom for us on one of their normal days off.  Folks stayed around afterwards and the really good Lo-Rez beers were a much needed antidote to the 12 bad beers we had just tried!  Dave also took anyone who wished on a tour of the brewery.

Five Lo-Rez staff participated in the workshop, too, which was great.  Some of them might be interested in getting Cicerone certification and knowing off-flavors is helpful for that. 

It was a diverse group - in addition to the Lo Rez folks, we had two professional brewers from another local brewery, Horse Thief Hollow.  So, we had three professional brewers, four beer servers, nine homebrewers and two non-brewing beer drinkers.  

In the off-flavor workshops I'd attended before, it was a homogenous group - all homebrewers.  The diversity of this group, both in terms of their experiences and in what they were hoping to get out of the workshop, made this a livelier and more interesting workshop.  

We charged $30/person for the workshop and contributed the proceeds - $510 - to our homebrew club, CHAOS.  

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