Your Tasting Brain with Randy Mosher – BeerSmith Podcast #349

Randy Mosher joins me to discuss his just released book “Your Tasting Brain” which covers the complex science of taste, flavor, aroma, mental models and practical tasting.

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Topics in This Week’s Episode (46:53)

This week I welcome back Randy Mosher. This week Randy Mosher joins me to discuss mental models, ingredients, tasting, and how these factors all play into designing great beers. Randy is the author of the books Mastering Homebrew, Radical Brewing, and Tasting Beer. (Full disclosure: Amazon affiliate links to books) He’s also partner in two breweries near Chicago Five Rabbit and Forbidden Root.
We briefly discuss the status of Randy’s two breweries.
Next we dive into Randy’s new book Your Tasting Brain (Amazon affiliate link). Randy divides the book into two major sections: science and practical tasting.
We talk about the senses: taste, mouthfeel and smell and how the all are combined together in the brain to create the perception of flavor.
Randy discusses the human nose which is incredibly sensitive – able to detect some compounds in concentrations as small as parts per trillion.
He tells us how the brain condenses a ton of sensory information into a single perception of flavor, and also how hard it is to decompose individual tastes and aromas once the brain has combined them.
Randy explains how genetic, cultural and personal experiences all shape how we perceive flavors and aromas and can actually result in two people getting markedly different experiences from the same food and drink.
We also explore how hard it is to capture flavors in speech.
In section 2, Randy talks about practical tasting, and we discuss some of the flavors that are important to alcoholic beverages.
He discusses judging beer and how one might get better at it over time with practice.
We talk about environmental factors and how music, lighting, temperature, and foods we are eating can all affect what we experience with taste.
Randy mentions his website and newsletter which you can find linked on RandyMosher.com
Randy shares his closing thoughts.