So we all know how to drink, right? But how do you taste a beer, a wine, or a spirit to get the most unique and thorough tasting experience? Here's a few helpful hints:
Prepare
You shouldn't smoke, brush your teeth, or eat or drink anything with a strong flavor for about 15 minutes before you taste. Also, use appropriate glassware. If you are tasting specifically to hone your palate, or blind tasting, or doing any other type of formal tasting, you will want a clear glass that allows a good view from all angles of your beverage of choice. You will also want something with plenty of room to breath, and a tapered opening. This will allow the aromas to fully develop in the glass, but also concentrate them on your nose and palate. Snifters and red wine glasses make great tasting glasses.
Look
You want to look at the beer, wine, or spirit first, especially if you are blind tasting, or tasting against a certain style or varietal. You are looking for several things: color, shade, opaqueness, haze, sediment, etc. With sparkling wine and beer, you're also looking at the carbonation. Are the bubbles large or small? Do they rise quickly or slowly, or do they just kind of linger at the sides of the glass or the top? With beer in particular, is there a head? What is the color and consistency of the head? Does it hold or dissipate quickly? Once it dissipates, does it leave lacing on the sides of the glass? Give the glass a slow swirl. Especially with beer and sparkling wine, be gentle. When you swirl the glass, does the beverage leave "legs" or streaks on the glass? This is a good indication of texture, and can give you some clues about residual sugar as well as alcohol content of what you are tasting. All of these factors can provide important clues as to what you're about to drink, or give you some indication of the quality and the adherence to style guidelines and prototypes.
Smell
Our taste buds only taste sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami. The rest of what we perceive as flavor is actually tied to our sense of smell. In order to fully appreciate a drink, we should smell it before we taste it. Give the glass another gentle swirl. This will release more smells inside the glass. Several short sniffs are better than one long one. Especially if you are in a place with other smells, try to isolate the smells of the drink. Don't be afraid to stick your nose right in the glass. Or, make a cup using your hand, or even waft the aromas of the beverage toward your nose. If you are blind tasting, look for smells that stick out as telltale aromas of certain styles, then narrow it down from there. If you are not blind tasting, run through some smells you might expect from this particular spirit, beer style, or varietal. Use the opportunity of smelling the beverage to pull out fruit, caramel, chocolate, or other notes which can easily be confused with sweetness, and make note of them so you can use them later. Let your mind run wild. Our sense of smell is closely linked to a lot of emotional memories, which can mean that smelling a drink can be the most enjoyable part about tasting it!
Taste
Yes, you finally get to taste the spirit. There are a lot of things you're looking for here, and I find that the best way to get them all is to actually taste in three separate sips.
The first sip, wash the beverage through your mouth. Wash it over, under, and around your tongue. Make sure it hits the tip of the tongue, the back of your throat, the roof of your mouth, and swallow it. Although it is a myth that we only taste certain tastes on certain parts of the tongues, the receptors for each taste are distributed differently in each part of the mouth. Swishing the drink over everything allows you to perceive the tastes at different parts of the mouth and tongue. Pay particular attention to sweetness and bitterness here. Sweetness can be tricky, and this is where the smells you picked up on earlier come in. Sweetness in alcoholic beverages comes from residual (unfermented) sugars. Do you get sweetness when you are more focused on the basic flavors of the drink? Or is a chocolate, caramel, fruit, or other flavor giving an illusion of sweetness? Finally, use this as an opportunity to assess the mouthfeel and body of the beer, wine, or spirit. Does it glide right off your tongue? Does it leave a sticky, syrupy residue? Is it somewhere in between? Does it make you pucker up? Does it leave parts of your mouth dry and thirsty for more? This can tell you a lot about the characteristics of a beer, wine, or spirit.
The second sip, swallow the beverage, and immediately exhale through your nose. This will give you a rush of "flavors" as your sense of smell kicks in to process all of the vapors left behind from your drink. This should be the most intense part of the tasting, allowing your senses of smell and taste to interact completely. Look for the same smells you got when you smelled, as well as any new surprises. Do the flavors all come at once? Is there a taste you got when you first took the sip that fades into another mid-palate, and yet another as you exhale?
Finally, just take a sip. Drink it like you would if you were at the dinner table, or at a party with friends. Hopefully your perception is enhanced by the whole exercise of tasting. At the end of the day, though, your overall impression should be based on what you enjoy or don't enjoy on a daily basis. Is the flavor pleasant? Do all of the things you've tasted before blend together nicely, fight for attention, or each stand out individually? Is one dominant over the others? Does one particular flavor linger on the palate? Most importantly, now that you have (hopefully) gained a better understanding of the wine, beer, or spirit, how do you like it? Is it your new favorite, one you can't wait to have more of, a good choice, or not for you?
Tasting can be both fun and educational. Blind tasting is a great way to develop your palate. Tasting a product (even one you've had a million times) in a more thoughtful and structured way is a great way to become more familiar with it, and hopefully gain a deeper appreciation.
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