tasting spirits will always be subjective and cannot be treated as an exact science, but it can nonetheless be guided by discipline and informed by practice. To begin with, each person develops different preferences among food and drink, so it should be assumed that each taster is having a slightly different experience, based on a lifetime of experiences that informs his or her preferences.
It is also understood that each individual has greater or lesser sensitivities to an innumerable array of aromas and flavors; for example, “supertasters,” as they are known, are highly sensitive to bitterness. See supertaster. The so-called primary flavors of sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami are not universally experienced, and there is no precise norm for any of them.
Equally, there is no one, best tasting method; each person can and ought to approach tasting differently. That said, the method used by the BAR group (Beverage Alcohol Resource) to teach spirits tasting and analysis (based at least in part on some of the concepts also used by the Court of Master Sommeliers) has been proved effective in helping literally hundreds of students to correctly identify spirits in blind tasting. See
Sensory evaluation relies upon the senses of sight, smell, touch, and taste to identify a spirit’s primary characteristics. With wine analysis, the majority of the appropriate descriptors can be gathered via sight and smell; tasting is usually deployed more often to verify than to determine.
Spirits are different, not only because of the variability of their alcoholic strengths but also due to factors such as blending, compounding, and flavoring, which can make a spirit smell like something it’s not. Furthermore, taste becomes a critically important measure of sweetness, tartness, bitterness, and perhaps more importantly, alcohol strength and purity. Spirits of 40 percent or 50 percent can all smell powerful, but well-crafted spirits can provide elegance as well, a trait difficult to smell. Tasting the spirit and then, after twenty or thirty seconds, drawing air gently in through the mouth can expose methanol volatility or other impurities. Conversely, very clean spirit will respond to oxygen by stimulating the cold receptors as mint does. Well-crafted spirit may generate a salivary response; spirit with ameliorants or additives may taste thick and sweet in the finish.
As with all beverage analysis, patience can be revealing. A great spirit may offer power; it may offer delicacy. It should linger; it should seem cleaner in equal measure to the length of the finish. It’s difficult to put into words what great spirit is, whether it is a vodka, a whisky, a mezcal, a cognac. But each spirit category contains greater and lesser examples. Those that are wanting are typically short in flavor; they may be sweet or off, or smell or taste hotter than their alcohol percentage indicates. Great spirits seem to gather complexity as they linger in the mouth. They ought to embody the most indefinable character of all: balance.
Balance is subjective; this should be admitted at the outset. Yet there is a common thread: balanced spirit has many descriptors but none that dominate. A balanced spirit offers its myriad flavors and aromas an equal opportunity to manifest. Moreover, a balanced spirit often embodies a term the British and Irish have long celebrated: “moreish-ness,” the idea that a great spirit makes you want to drink more of it. See balance.
But these qualitative assessments require consistency; and that requires a tasting system. The mistake made by most amateur tasters is to focus only upon the obvious traits; a serious taster takes the time and commits to the discipline required to notice all available descriptors, the obvious and the nuanced.
Always learn what you can from the look of a spirit. Brown spirits offer certain clues. White spirits can do the same. Many rich and powerful vodkas and gins look weighty as they roll around in a glass; they may appear pewter or even grey. Many commercial white spirits with only commercial ambitions look like water; those that have had sugar added to them (a bad idea with gin or vodka) tend to leave a ring around the glass.
Brown spirits are rarely simply brown. Bourbon often has a red cast; actors in old Western movies sometimes used the term “red eye” to describe good whisky. The idea wasn’t absurd; whisky barrel makers talk about the “red line” in a barrel, the limit at which the burn and char has saturated the wood. Aging a spirit in a newly charred barrel will give whisky a decidedly red cast. Conversely, spirits aged in used barrels won’t offer that red hue. See barrel.
After evaluating the spirit visually, it is best to proceed to evaluating its aroma. Aromas in great spirits can be overwhelmingly complex, but a systematic approach offers organizing principles that allow cacophony to organize into music.
A good place to begin is with fruit. Does this spirit have fruit aromas? (A spirit does not need to be distilled from fruit to have them; while it may seem counterintuitive, even grain-based spirits show fruity aromas and flavors, courtesy of yeasts and the flavors inherent in the grain.) If so, what kind? Categories of fruit can be broken down into pomme fruits (apples and pears, aromas often found in, for instance, malt whiskies), citrus fruits (oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruits, tangerines, characteristic of white spirits), stone fruits (peaches, apricots, nectarines, quince, found in many brandies), tropical fruits (bananas, pineapples, kiwis, and the like, often associated with cane and agave spirits), dried and concentrated fruits, melons, red fruits, black fruits, on and on. Ask yourself about the condition of those fruits: Are they ripe or unripe, fresh, cooked, or desiccated? In barrel-aged spirits, the longer it has been in the barrel, the farther from fresh the fruit notes tend to be. See
Next, check for flowers. Younger spirits are often quite floral, but so are aged Highland malt whiskies. The flowers may be fresh; they may be dried. Then look for herbs, grains, vegetables (tequilas, for instance, can have strong green pepper notes), minerals (although these can be difficult to pick up on the palate, some vodkas have subtle mineral notes, as do some tequilas), and spices. Even though one of these categories is unlikely to be represented, it is always worth consciously checking for it. Spirits are complex, and subsidiary notes can be surprising. Finally, check for “other.” That can include the “hogo” found in many rums, the honey found in many barley spirits, peat smoke, and the cheesy, mushroomy notes of rancio. See hogo; peat; and rancio.
Only once the spirit’s scent has been thoroughly searched into should you proceed to tasting. This will confirm, but also sometimes challenge, the information you pulled out of the nose, while adding information on proof, texture, and finish. The aromas and the flavors you perceive will collectively become that individual spirit’s profile, something to stick into your memory for the next time you might encounter it. If you perform similar analyses on multiple expressions from the same category, you will be able to pick out common elements that will form the category’s profile, enabling you to see how a particular expression fits into it—and also to reach an informed opinion on its quality.
To see the kind of thinking that goes into making such a determination, let us backtrack and take another look at spices. Notes of various baking spices—cinnamon, clove, allspice, nutmeg—are generally a sign that a spirit has been aged in wood. But so are overtly “woody” flavors, including sawdust, wood ash, old-furniture aromas, and notes of pine resin and cedar.
One of the legitimate queries for any spirits taster—indeed, perhaps the primary one—is “Is this spirit good to drink?” In the case of a barrel-aged spirit, the question becomes: Is the wood expressed as enhancing spice, or does the bitter, dusty, spicy character of wood aging overwhelm the fresh and even fruity notes of a bright spirit? There is no right or wrong to such a question: we have entered the realm of the subjective.
With brown spirits, barrels have very distinct aromas and flavors. First, they are spicy (cinnamon, clove, allspice, nutmeg, black pepper, and many other spices). Barrels also provide torrefaction aromas: caramel, butterscotch, maple, vanilla, and such. European barrels may present more with vanilla and ginger; American oak barrels will offer notes of vanilla too, but there is often an herbal element, such as dill; American oak also provides more prominent coconut notes than does European oak. American oak doesn’t leak when you cut it across the grain; European oak does, so European oak barrels are split along the grain, while American oak barrels are sawn along the quarter grain; they can smell like fresh or charred sawdust as a result, as do the spirits aged within them. These descriptions may seem precious and absurd; if you pay attention to the aromas in spirits, they are not. Spirits that have spent too long in a barrel will lose their balance, with the woody, spicy flavor of the wood (along with bitterness and astringency) overwhelming all other flavors. For some collectors, this is not perceived as a problem; older is better. But assuming that it is considered a problem generally, where is the line between spice and wood? Its placement may be different for you depending on the base spirit, the type of oak, and any number of other factors. This is where system and experience can only take you so far. What you are left with is taste, and, of course, there is no accounting for that. All one can do is try to understand it.
See also flavor and sensory evaluation.
Beauchamp, Gary, and Linda Bartoshuk. Tasting and Smelling. Cambridge: Academic Press, 1997.
Wolfe, Jeremy, Keith Kluender, and Dennis Levi. Sensation and Perception. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2011.
By: Doug Frost