Reade Huddleston

It’s important to know the specs, but take nothing for granted. In-house quality testing and monitoring of ingredients can help you ensure consistent spirits and avoid big headaches down the road.

• distilling
• sensory analysis
• quality testing

The spicy compound 4-vinyl-guaiacol occurs in many drinks, but among distillers, it’s best known as a flavor component of certain whiskeys—especially ryes. Whether you want to dial it up, dial it down, or just dial it in, here’s what to know.

• Rye Whiskey
• 4VG
• Fermentation

It can be time-consuming and expensive to establish and train a well-run descriptive tasting panel—but it’s a powerful tool for craft distillers to assess their products for flavor, aroma, and consistency.

• Testing
• Descriptive Analysis
• Quality assurance

While there are limitations—and scoring high on likeability is no guarantee that a product will succeed—properly conducted hedonic testing can be a powerful tool for distillers and others in the beverage business.

• sensory science
• hedonic testing

When distillers need sensory evaluation to identify outliers or differences in samples, look no further than discriminative testing. Here’s how it works.

• Sensory
• Sensory Evaluation
• Discriminative Testing

When it comes to analyzing the results of sensory evaluation, statistics can be a complicated yet powerful tool to use in the pursuit of higher-quality spirits.

• Analysis
• sensory

To set up the best possible sensory evaluation at your distillery, you want to identify the most effective evaluators and know how to properly run your tests. Here are some tips to ensure you’re collecting the most valuable data on your spirits.

• Sensory
• Testing
• Distillery

Ready to start some sensory analysis on your products? Know your target, and know your weaknesses. In the first of a series, here’s an introduction to three main types of testing, as well as some biases that can occur when anyone tastes a spirit.

• Sensory
• Tasting
• QA/QC