Over the course of the winter, when I was writing about teaching sensory detail for beer, I wrote: 

My hope is that by the end of the six week course they’ll learn to slow down a little and appreciate things more, maybe develop more experience, maybe learn to direct that impulse. Some of them will be out there this morning paying more attention to breakfast or their morning coffee. Finding gradation and texture in their worlds. 

I love watching that happen. At the moment we’re in the middle of an applied section in the Complex Beer Pairing course at the culinary school. The students pick a beer out of a hat and then have to come to grips with the properties of that beer before attempting to pair it with a restaurant quality dish. They have not only to design the pairing, but they need to create it at home, and then present it to their peers. Some of them go through rounds of trial and error over weeks.

It’s graded more in terms of success than sophistication. Not everyone is a chef! Not everyone cooks. I just want them to apply themselves to a new task and think about the problem. This semester someone got Bud Light Double Lime and they’re thinking very seriously about it. They had questions about mint.

This is very rewarding, and a little bit confusing. I am probably the only person in North America doing this with bespoke pairings presented in class. You can see them pick up detail about how beer and food interact and they get better week after week. By the end of the course, they’ll be able to add a little joie de vivre to their supper table for the rest of their lives. Not bad for less than $300 Canadian.

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There are problems with teaching sensory that you begin to notice after a few hundred hours of instruction. I hasten to add that this is not program specific. It has more to do with discourse and canon. Whether it is the Cicerone, Prud’homme, BJCP, or any other set of available data, there are little bits and pieces missing. Attempting to add to the canon or to amend the canon requires confidence verging on bravado or possibly total delusion.

Recently, I was in Chicago at the Siebel Institute at the behest of George Brown in order to attend training for the WSET Level 2 Award in Beer, which I shall be instructing at some point in the near future in addition to my own material. It’s a very good course, with a lot of student engagement built in, and some very clever design. I’m looking forward to it.

As part of the training for delivering the program, I had to present a West Coast IPA and a Hazy IPA. We had a room full of quite good tasters, all of whom were game to contribute and some of whom were relatively new to the subject matter having come from the world of wine. 

I had to present Firestone Walker Union Jack, which is a classic West Coast IPA. It does all of the things that it should. The tasters were able to identify not only grapefruit, but the colour of the grapefruit. They were able to tell me whether it was zest or pith. They were able to tell me about the grapefruit juice. There were mentions of lemon and orange. Some pine resin. A small amount of caramel sweetness. It would change ever so slightly on the palate, but it’s a 7.2% brawler of an IPA and old school besides, so it does a specific thing.

I had to present Loosey Juicy IPA from Short Fuse Brewing. That one was a little shakier in terms of profile from can to can, but the tasters acquitted themselves very nicely. There was still grapefruit, orange, lemon, lime, pineapple, mango, melon and at one point, someone might even have ventured strawberry and papaya. There’s not a lot of character from the grain, but the fruit salad held up pretty darn well. Hazy IPAs tend to be a little inspecific in that way. Fruity hop character, but the range of fruit varies wildly depending on the hop varieties and yeast esters. 

What we had, then, were a group of extremely qualified people from disparate non-tropical Canadian Cities (and one guy from Peru) who were readily able to identify a papaya and suggest its level of ripeness. They could mentally dismantle a white grapefruit, zest it, peel it, juice it, and fend off scurvy with it. Neither of these things grow in Canada. When someone achieves it, it is reported as a quirky human interest story. 

But such is the facility of the modern world with agricultural shipping, that we don’t actually have to deal with seasonality in terms of thought process or palate. The Loblaws flyer this week says we have American cherries, Chilean apples, South African mandarins, and Mexican grapes. You can always have everything, although not always on sale. When you consider that the development of much of the public facing educational material related to beer has happened since the early 1980’s, you can see how the supermarket has won a facile victory over the palate. 

My mom, born just after the second World War, revealed to me the other week that she didn’t know she had a shellfish allergy until she was in her 20’s. The likelihood of encountering shrimp in Ontario was such that, even as a medical professional, she didn’t diagnose it until then because it only cropped up during the British Airways in-flight menu and she’d written it off as motion sickness.

Total availability means that there is a creeping genericism in the design, style, and production of beer. Much has been written recently about the Hazy IPA and its place in the world, but as I detailed here, the public palate for beer has less to do with beer and more to do with the nostalgia for childhood. I can absolutely tell you that my marker for passion fruit isn’t fruit. It’s a President’s Choice passion fruit sorbet from the mid 1980’s when Dave Nichols went crazy for that flavour. One man in charge of a grocery chain flips for a certain ingredient and your brain is changed forever. If you’re, say, thirty five or younger, you’ve simply had these flavours kicking around for your entire life, to the extent that you can reasonably be expected to tell the difference between pineapple and mango. It’s historically aberrant.

This works to the exclusion of other potentially interesting characters.

If I were to ask the same room of qualified tasters, or indeed, students at George Brown to follow up on Tropical Fruit or Citrus, I would get a concrete set of markers. If I were to ask them to follow up on “Floral” as a descriptor, I would get a room full of blank stares. Fairly often, you hear people say things like “I’m not a flower person,” or “oh, those little white ones,” or, periodically, a very tentative “rose” with an upward inflection because it’s more of a question than an answer.

Hops are flowers, you know. We’ve made them smell like citrus and tropical fruit, but there’s a lot of more interesting stuff underlying that.

My intention, during my down time for the rest of the summer, is to build out something of a palate guide to florality as I potter about the city trying to get my steps in. Maybe it’ll be useful, maybe it won’t, but I think it will be interesting. I plan to cross reference a number of sources including Harold McGee, the Barth Haas hop manual, and various scientific studies to break down aromatic compounds and essential oils. I’ve never seen much in the way of an approachable guide to this subject matter and I can’t imagine anyone else doing it. I must be either very confident or totally insane.