Craft distillers often have strong ideas about the products they want to make and how those products should taste. Yet there is great value in measuring how much consumers like a product—and that liking is a thing that can be measured and analyzed.
In previous articles, we’ve touched on evaluator recruitment, the statistics of sensory science, and discriminative testing. In this one, we take a closer look at hedonic testing and its uses in the beverage industry.
What Is Hedonic Testing?
In sensory science, we use the term “hedonic” for testing that’s designed to measure how much a consumer likes something. Hedonic tests can measure enjoyment of specific aspects of a product or of the product as a whole. Producers often perform these tests when they are creating new products or altering existing ones to better suit the current market.
There are many different ways to conduct hedonic testing, but in distilling and the wider beverage industry, the most common and simple method is to have consumers taste samples of the products in question and then ask them to rate them using a decided-upon scale. The producer can then analyze the ratings to determine which products have the highest and lowest hedonic scores and then make decisions based on these scores.
While hedonic testing is relatively easy to conduct, there are some important factors and limitations that sensory scientists should understand before they begin testing.