Randy Mosher on Sensory Science and Beer Flavor Synergy

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McFleshman's: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Respecting the Beer.

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My name is Gary Arnt.

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With me again, as usual, is the man who gave a Valentine's Day card to his wife this year that said, I lager you, Mr.

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Bobby Fledgeman.

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It was on a Sweetie a Sweetheart Candy.

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Yeah.

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Back again on the show, the Returning Champion, Kerry Guerin, level one Cone, and I think achieving Level one cone allows you to use the title Dame.

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I'll, I'll take it.

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I'll take it

Randy Mosher: 00:00:35

but you don't get it to Yara just yet.

Randy Mosher: 00:00:38

McFleshman's: with my level two if I get that.

Randy Mosher: 00:00:40

Oh yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:00:41

Yeah, definitely.

Randy Mosher: 00:00:42

McFleshman's: And the guy we're gonna have is a guest on the show, but I guess you're just gonna kind of be on the panel here today.

Randy Mosher: 00:00:47

Aaron, introduce yourself.

Randy Mosher: 00:00:49

'cause I haven't gotten ready.

Randy Mosher: 00:00:50

I didn't know you would be here.

Randy Mosher: 00:00:51

Oh, oh.

Randy Mosher: 00:00:52

My name is Aaron RIRs and I am one of the brewers here.

Randy Mosher: 00:00:56

And you've shaved, you don't, you're not Full Duck Dynasty.

Randy Mosher: 00:01:00

Well, I, you know, it's, it's coming.

Randy Mosher: 00:01:01

It's, it's working on it.

Randy Mosher: 00:01:04

We got a great guest today.

Randy Mosher: 00:01:06

He's the author of many books, but for the purpose of this episode, he is the author of the upcoming book, your Tasting Brain, A Sensory Approach to Wine, beer, and Other Pleasures.

Randy Mosher: 00:01:15

And he's done a whole lot of stuff in the beer industry.

Randy Mosher: 00:01:18

Please welcome Randy Moser.

Randy Mosher: 00:01:19

How are you doing?

Randy Mosher: 00:01:21

I am doing well.

Randy Mosher: 00:01:21

How you doing?

Randy Mosher: 00:01:22

McFleshman's: Good.

Randy Mosher: 00:01:22

Where are you coming from?

Randy Mosher: 00:01:23

Chicago?

Randy Mosher: 00:01:25

McFleshman's: Oh, so you're in the neighborhood.

Randy Mosher: 00:01:26

Yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:01:27

In the neighborhood.

Randy Mosher: 00:01:27

Three hours I think away,

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McFleshman's: So you've, you've written many books dealing with Beer and Brewing, and your upcoming book is, it seems a little broader.

Randy Mosher: 00:01:38

Much broader.

Randy Mosher: 00:01:39

McFleshman's: So what was the genesis of it?

Randy Mosher: 00:01:42

What led you to write it?

Randy Mosher: 00:01:44

Well, I, um, thought I had another book or two in me, but I didn't really have anything that I thought needed to be said about beer at this point.

Randy Mosher: 00:01:53

And, uh, you know, I don't know that you could really write a so, uh, interesting book about seltzer and all that stuff.

Randy Mosher: 00:02:00

So I wasn't gonna do that.

Randy Mosher: 00:02:02

And, uh, I had started giving talks called beer.

Randy Mosher: 00:02:05

Beer Tasting is a path to self-awareness just as kind of a jokey thing.

Randy Mosher: 00:02:10

But, you know, my point was if you actually pursue tasting, you learn an awful lot about the human mind and the human, human body and everything else.

Randy Mosher: 00:02:20

Human genetics and uh, you know, all kinds of stuff.

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And so I realized at some point it's like, you know, that is a book that needs to be written, but it doesn't want to be a beer book.

Randy Mosher: 00:02:31

It needs to be much as you say, much broader and cover really everything you'd wanna.

Randy Mosher: 00:02:36

Smell, drink, taste, you know, it's it, it covers both how we, how we do that.

Randy Mosher: 00:02:43

And also, uh, some basic information about the flavors that are in the things that we love to taste.

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Like beer, like wine, like spirits.

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Little bit about food, like chocolate, coffee, tea, some things like that.

Randy Mosher: 00:02:56

Uh, towards the end.

Randy Mosher: 00:02:57

So that was the, that was the genesis.

Randy Mosher: 00:03:00

And then we, uh, that was in 19, 20 18.

Randy Mosher: 00:03:03

And then we started shopping it around.

Randy Mosher: 00:03:05

And in 2019 we got some offers and we decided to go with the University of Chicago Press.

Randy Mosher: 00:03:11

And we were looking for an academic publisher 'cause we wanted that weight behind it, you know.

Randy Mosher: 00:03:16

And, uh, so this is a fully footnoted it's not a, it's not an academic book.

Randy Mosher: 00:03:21

It's a book book of what they call a trade book.

Randy Mosher: 00:03:24

But it is I read 500, five 5 million words of scientific papers to do the

Randy Mosher: 00:03:31

McFleshman's: I,

Randy Mosher: 00:03:31

on this.

Randy Mosher: 00:03:32

McFleshman's: so, Randy, I was gonna bring that up.

Randy Mosher: 00:03:34

Uh, your background, you're, you're not a scientist by training, right?

Randy Mosher: 00:03:38

No, not at

Randy Mosher: 00:03:39

McFleshman's: you dove deep on this from even what I've seen.

Randy Mosher: 00:03:42

I haven't been able to see the full text, but yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:03:44

I've seen some, some figures and some nods to all the different sciences is.

Randy Mosher: 00:03:49

yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:03:49

Well, I just had a lot of questions.

Randy Mosher: 00:03:51

You know, I really, I've been pursuing beer and involved with a brewery here in Chicago called Forbidden Root, and we have one in Columbus, Ohio Also.

Randy Mosher: 00:04:00

I was involved with a Latin brewery startup called Five Rabbits Veia.

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That's, uh, I think on hiatus now, maybe coming back at some point.

Randy Mosher: 00:04:09

So, and also involved with teaching classes at the Siebel Institute, and, you know, really trying to be a good taster and really understand how to do that and judging beer at, at GIBF and things like that.

Randy Mosher: 00:04:21

So, in addition to home brew home brewing and home brew stuff, and home brew judging I, uh, just have been.

Randy Mosher: 00:04:29

Pursuing it, but I didn't really have what I thought was really the background in it.

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And I, I, so I just thought, well, if it's somebody needs to write this book and it has to be a fool like me, because I just jumped into it like, oh, I could do this.

Randy Mosher: 00:04:45

And then, four months after starting work, I finished work on the first, on the chapter on taste.

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And I thought, wow, that was really hard.

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Uh, mouthfeel ought to be a lot easier.

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And then I got into mouth feel, and it's like, holy crap, this is really complicated.

Randy Mosher: 00:04:58

You know, we have millions of years of evolution.

Randy Mosher: 00:05:01

Some of this stuff, the, these receptors and the things that we work with, they go back to the beginning of life.

Randy Mosher: 00:05:07

You know, there's not a, not a creature on the planet that has ever lived, that had not, that does not have some kind of chemical sense.

Randy Mosher: 00:05:16

That's the most fundamental sense, because if you're drifting around the ocean.

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A tiny little microbe.

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You gotta find food and you gotta avoid danger, right?

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And how do we do that?

Randy Mosher: 00:05:26

We do that with sensory sensory apparatus.

Randy Mosher: 00:05:29

So, so I learned a lot about evolution.

Randy Mosher: 00:05:32

I learned a lot about the genome.

Randy Mosher: 00:05:34

I, I mean, I really just like every single question I could possibly think of, I just dove in and got the papers and started reading it and banging my head against the wall.

Randy Mosher: 00:05:44

And, you know, uh, sometimes there were some things that were so complicated.

Randy Mosher: 00:05:48

I had to make diagrams of them.

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I had to like, make a picture or make a diagram just so that I could understand kind of the structure and function of things.

Randy Mosher: 00:05:57

So, 'cause I'm, you know, I've spent a career as a visual artist.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:00

That's really my, my main profession.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:02

Writing is.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:03

Was, was kind of a sideline, it's taken over.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:06

But that's my, my training and my expertise is design.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:11

So I use that in my books, as you guys know.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:13

But I always try and have a lot of visual content because I think it's really helpful.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:17

And I think certainly for sure, I, some people are more just learn better that way.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:23

And so to have both words and pictures really helps, I think.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:27

So it certainly was a tool for me to just to figure it out for my own sake, so, and to be able to then explain it to other people.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:35

McFleshman's: We're all inquisitive by nature from the beginning, and you seem never to have lost that.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:40

I, I, I admire that.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:42

I, I'm a physicist, gone brewer at some

Randy Mosher: 00:06:44

Yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:44

That's cool.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:45

Yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:46

McFleshman's: had to dive into the chemistry microbiology, and I went to uc, Davis and did all of that.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:51

Oh man.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:51

Yeah, that's, yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:06:53

McFleshman's: so you are, are you, is, I don't mean to take a a, a negative turn here, but is Siebel, is it now in Canada?

Randy Mosher: 00:06:59

Is that right?

Randy Mosher: 00:07:01

Is that

Randy Mosher: 00:07:01

Well, so the, the siebel's parent companies in Montreal,

Randy Mosher: 00:07:05

McFleshman's: okay?

Randy Mosher: 00:07:06

and, um, it's kind of a complicated story, but ear early, like in, in the back in the heyday of American beer, Siebel had.

Randy Mosher: 00:07:16

B people from all like Anheuser-Busch and Miller and all the big breweries.

Randy Mosher: 00:07:21

And there were a lot of 'em back then.

Randy Mosher: 00:07:23

There were Schlitt and Paps and Blats and, and a lot of little regional breweries.

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And that was Siebel's stock and trade.

Randy Mosher: 00:07:29

And then at some point, the big guys, I mean, that all got consolidated and then the big guys decided, well, it's a lot less expensive and easier for us to just do our own training.

Randy Mosher: 00:07:38

So some, a lot of that stuff started stopped.

Randy Mosher: 00:07:41

But then of course, right about that same time craft Brewing really got going.

Randy Mosher: 00:07:45

And then they, they were now the craft brewing, you know, in terms of new people coming into it and, and people wanting to take classes to become brewers.

Randy Mosher: 00:07:55

There's less demand for Siebel.

Randy Mosher: 00:07:58

And they had been relying pretty heavily on, on people from Mexico and Brazil and, and, uh, elsewhere in Latin, mostly in Latin America, but also a little bit from Asia.

Randy Mosher: 00:08:08

And, you know, the, the immigration.

Randy Mosher: 00:08:13

Madness that's going on in our country and the extreme vetting of people coming in to go to school, even a brewing school, they're, they're requiring people that to, uh, upload their, to send in their passwords to all their social media account, to let the immigration people poke through those and see if they can find subversive content.

Randy Mosher: 00:08:34

So people are just like freaked out.

Randy Mosher: 00:08:36

They see what's happening in the US and they're freaked out even without all that intrusiveness and just worried that they'll, they'll get in and they'll get arrested or they'll won't be able to get in, and then they've lost their money and their plane ticket and, and so there weren't enough people to run the class this year in the US and so the, the, they decided to run the class in Montreal instead.

Randy Mosher: 00:08:57

So, uh, but that means that there's not really any use for the, the very expensive siebel facility that the last president at Siebel put together, that was a pretty big burden in terms of rent and everything.

Randy Mosher: 00:09:11

So, you know, it was very sad, very sad.

Randy Mosher: 00:09:13

I mean, that company started in 1877,

Randy Mosher: 00:09:16

McFleshman's: Right.

Randy Mosher: 00:09:17

right?

Randy Mosher: 00:09:17

As a 150 year ongoing business in Chicago.

Randy Mosher: 00:09:21

We're gonna run some classes.

Randy Mosher: 00:09:23

I'm gonna still do my, uh, professional beer styles and cl tasting class here.

Randy Mosher: 00:09:27

I think there'll be some activity here, but we'll be doing it in breweries and things like that.

Randy Mosher: 00:09:31

But it, it's a shame to, to see that all, uh, packed up and go away.

Randy Mosher: 00:09:36

It's really a loss for Chicago, and it was really, you know, Siebel was a big nexus for the people in the brewing community, and they would occasionally just say, Hey, anybody wants to come over?

Randy Mosher: 00:09:45

We're p we're pouring beer at the tap room.

Randy Mosher: 00:09:47

And just like, hang out with the brewers and things like that.

Randy Mosher: 00:09:49

So it was a, it was a great thing to be associated with and I'm still associated with it, but we're trying to see how it's gonna all shake out.

Randy Mosher: 00:09:56

But it was definitely, uh,

Randy Mosher: 00:09:58

McFleshman's: Moving, moving forward with, with that, are you, you and Ray Daniels affiliated, uh, in, in the education sphere or,

Randy Mosher: 00:10:05

Yeah, we, I mean, we started doing a cla, we started doing a class at Siebel and then he, so we worked on a shared knowledge base basically, and he took his, he took the shared knowledge base and he started cone with it.

Randy Mosher: 00:10:21

And I took the knowledge base and I, I wrote tasting beer with that, because that was a class before it was a book.

Randy Mosher: 00:10:28

McFleshman's: Mm-hmm.

Randy Mosher: 00:10:29

So it's why it reads, it's very logical and it kind of progresses from one thing to another, covers everything.

Randy Mosher: 00:10:34

And Ray and I are great friends and, uh, he, he's been really helpful in a lot of different ways and, and we, uh, we share a lot of, we share a lot of commonalities and we had great fun in Chicago here.

Randy Mosher: 00:10:45

Being involved with the Chicago Beer Society.

Randy Mosher: 00:10:48

Which is the, one of the country's oldest beer appreciation groups.

Randy Mosher: 00:10:52

And one of the few that's not really a home brew club, it's really a beer appreciation society that's generally run by home brewers.

Randy Mosher: 00:11:00

But we do a lot public events, picnic beer and food like a, we call the Brew Pub Shootout.

Randy Mosher: 00:11:06

That's a beer and food event, uh, tasting in the fall, A real ale festival.

Randy Mosher: 00:11:10

We've done a bunch.

Randy Mosher: 00:11:11

We've got, uh, we've done Lager Fest and IPA fests and, and all kind of different things.

Randy Mosher: 00:11:17

So, I'm not, I, I did my time and I'm not that involved in it anymore, but we're coming up on our 50th anniversary for that.

Randy Mosher: 00:11:24

So that's a pretty big deal.

Randy Mosher: 00:11:26

McFleshman's: Heck yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:11:27

Yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:11:28

McFleshman's: So yours is required.

Randy Mosher: 00:11:29

Your yours and Ray Daniels Jamil, Zish, chef John Palmer.

Randy Mosher: 00:11:33

Those are required, required reading for anyone getting into craft beer or just appreciation of beer.

Randy Mosher: 00:11:39

So I was just saying, just saying I'm a big fan of you, uh, and what you've been able to put out there, Carrie, to my right, uh, is where first hire.

Randy Mosher: 00:11:47

She, she's a first level cone and she's, she knows your book.

Randy Mosher: 00:11:52

I don't wanna say front to back, but, uh, she's a big fan and, and we're all trying to keep up with what you're, what you're putting.

Randy Mosher: 00:11:58

It's a valuable resource for me.

Randy Mosher: 00:12:00

Well, thanks so much.

Randy Mosher: 00:12:01

Yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:12:01

Appreciate it.

Randy Mosher: 00:12:02

McFleshman's: I know I read the first edition on a Kindle when I lived in Boulder, Colorado, walking around town about getting hit by cars in the process.

Randy Mosher: 00:12:10

it, yeah, it, it was good From the beginning.

Randy Mosher: 00:12:12

There was something I was thinking about.

Randy Mosher: 00:12:14

Uh, I saw you give a talk down at the Wisconsin Brewers Guild meeting a few weeks ago, and, uh, you, I think you were talking about, and I don't wanna put this in the context of COVID, but it applies anywhere, but people losing their ability to taste one flavor or another.

Randy Mosher: 00:12:29

And you were talking about that not being permanent.

Randy Mosher: 00:12:31

Can, can you guys speak to that and what that neuro pathway repair or whatever may maybe looks like?

Randy Mosher: 00:12:37

Yeah, it's generally, it's generally not permanent.

Randy Mosher: 00:12:40

I mean, it depends.

Randy Mosher: 00:12:41

It's person to person.

Randy Mosher: 00:12:42

There's a lot of variation.

Randy Mosher: 00:12:43

Some people get it back really quick.

Randy Mosher: 00:12:45

Some people, you know, it's, you basically have about 400 different types of olfactory receptors in your nasal epithelium right in, in, in, right in here.

Randy Mosher: 00:12:57

And, and the nerves from those all pass through, little, little tiny holes in a bone.

Randy Mosher: 00:13:03

And then they go into something, an extension of your brain called the, uh, olfactory bulb.

Randy Mosher: 00:13:08

And that's really like a little bit of a, it's kind of like if you're familiar with audio signal processing.

Randy Mosher: 00:13:15

It's like that, but for smells.

Randy Mosher: 00:13:16

So it's reducing noise.

Randy Mosher: 00:13:18

It's, um, it's averaging signals.

Randy Mosher: 00:13:20

It's, rationalizing intensity levels.

Randy Mosher: 00:13:24

It's, uh, clear.

Randy Mosher: 00:13:25

It's completing imagery.

Randy Mosher: 00:13:27

It's, it's separating multiple images.

Randy Mosher: 00:13:30

So it does a lot of things that you would think of as like, it's just signal processing and that, and, and that those, those, um, nerves that go through the bone, you know, your receptors can die with, uh, extreme infections.

Randy Mosher: 00:13:46

Viruses really can mess with those things.

Randy Mosher: 00:13:48

And so you've gotta really, now, fortunately, that is one part of your brain that actually grows back.

Randy Mosher: 00:13:55

You're constantly renewing cells in your olfactory bulb.

Randy Mosher: 00:13:57

You're constantly renewing, renewing, um, neuron olfactory neurons because they're actually dangling out there in the mucus in your nose.

Randy Mosher: 00:14:05

And so they're very, very tiny, very thin.

Randy Mosher: 00:14:09

So they have a lot of surface area to handle a lot of receptors, but they're really fragile and it's a rough environment.

Randy Mosher: 00:14:15

And so they can they die with, I mean, they get replaced every two, three weeks, but the good news is they get replaced every two or three weeks.

Randy Mosher: 00:14:24

So if you get a bad respiratory infection you know, they'll grow back.

Randy Mosher: 00:14:28

The, the an issue for some people is that they, when they grow back, they grow back not in their correct wiring, right?

Randy Mosher: 00:14:37

Because all these different re receptors, all the same types of receptors are sort of like a telephone switchboard, all that.

Randy Mosher: 00:14:43

One type goes to certain area, and then another, they re, another type goes to another area, and then they start that through that processing thing and then into the brain.

Randy Mosher: 00:14:53

And so if they get scrambled, you have to relearn.

Randy Mosher: 00:14:58

Right.

Randy Mosher: 00:14:58

So, so the relearning process is basically, take a a cup and put orange juice in one and put like garlic in one and put, you know, pick mint in one and put strong smelling things that are really different and smell those a few times a day and do that for a few weeks.

Randy Mosher: 00:15:18

And every now and then, you know, mix it up and try some different things.

Randy Mosher: 00:15:23

And, you know, you just have to like, work on it and, and train on it.

Randy Mosher: 00:15:27

Really, essentially it's like training to beat a taster, but you're doing it kind of from zero, right?

Randy Mosher: 00:15:33

So you're trying to, you're trying to get your brain to rewire, to recognize these things and create, you know, we, those, those neurons, the res, the response that the neurons have, create a pattern that's like a picture.

Randy Mosher: 00:15:47

And the brain looks at it, but the brain doesn't actually take in, in all that chemical response information, that pattern, the pattern of response that we have to an odor, that we only use that for an image that we look at to recognize something.

Randy Mosher: 00:16:05

And after we do that, that in that information about the, which receptor responded to which chemical, the brain can't deal with it, it's too much, it's too complicated.

Randy Mosher: 00:16:15

It doesn't have the processing power.

Randy Mosher: 00:16:17

Very, very cumbersome.

Randy Mosher: 00:16:18

So at some point, when it enters the brain, it's about meaning, it's about value, it's about context.

Randy Mosher: 00:16:25

You know, it's, so we, the brain translates this chemical pattern and ma and basically tags it with meaning.

Randy Mosher: 00:16:33

And that's what you do when you become a taster, is you build up those index cards, those tags that are attached to the odors.

Randy Mosher: 00:16:42

That's what we learn.

Randy Mosher: 00:16:43

That's what wine people learn.

Randy Mosher: 00:16:44

They learn.

Randy Mosher: 00:16:46

You know, left bank Bordeaux, right?

Randy Mosher: 00:16:48

Bank bordeaux, cold se like a, a dry season, a wet season, a late season, an early season.

Randy Mosher: 00:16:55

You know, they learn that we don't do that with beer.

Randy Mosher: 00:16:57

We do styles, we do breweries, you know, so we have different, different tags that we put on 'em.

Randy Mosher: 00:17:03

But the ability, humans are really good at this, they're really good at categorizing, they're really good at creating these tags.

Randy Mosher: 00:17:09

And, and so, but anyway, things come back scrambled sometimes when you get over an infection.

Randy Mosher: 00:17:16

There's actually one phenomenon, it's called dis, uh, what's it?

Randy Mosher: 00:17:20

A smia.

Randy Mosher: 00:17:21

And there's actually one kind of well-known phenomenon that that a lot of otherwise pleasant things, especially roasty, things like, like coffee, chocolate, they actually smell like literally like crap.

Randy Mosher: 00:17:35

So they, they smell like feces and it's, they think it's some sulfur compound that's created by, by roasting.

Randy Mosher: 00:17:43

That may be the, the thing here that's getting misinterpreted.

Randy Mosher: 00:17:46

But, uh, so that's a fairly common thing.

Randy Mosher: 00:17:48

It seems weird as hell, but

Randy Mosher: 00:17:50

McFleshman's: That may explain a lot of mistakes I've made in my life.

Randy Mosher: 00:17:54

yeah, it applies to a lot of things.

Randy Mosher: 00:17:56

But, but anyway, that's just like, but, but yeah, just stay on it, you know?

Randy Mosher: 00:18:00

And it's the same with anything.

Randy Mosher: 00:18:02

You can, you know, nobody's a born, nobody is a born taster.

Randy Mosher: 00:18:06

There are no really, genuinely super smells.

Randy Mosher: 00:18:10

McFleshman's: You were talking about that when you spoke a couple weeks ago too, how, how women are more sensitive generally, but it doesn't sound like it's by much from what you say.

Randy Mosher: 00:18:18

it's not dramatic.

Randy Mosher: 00:18:20

It's, it's not dramatic.

Randy Mosher: 00:18:21

Um, uh, women as a, like, it's, it's always dangerous to generalize, but statistically women are more engaged with smell.

Randy Mosher: 00:18:31

Generally they're people that smell the roses perhaps, or whatever.

Randy Mosher: 00:18:36

If you look around at brewery breweries that have a sensory program, it's most often it's a woman doing it.

Randy Mosher: 00:18:43

And generally women have a little bit better command of language than men.

Randy Mosher: 00:18:47

Now, you know, it's, that's on average and every, everybody's different.

Randy Mosher: 00:18:51

So I don't

Randy Mosher: 00:18:52

want to

Randy Mosher: 00:18:52

McFleshman's: have you met Nicole Ernie by chance, who

Randy Mosher: 00:18:54

Oh, I know, I know Nicole.

Randy Mosher: 00:18:56

I know Nicole.

Randy Mosher: 00:18:56

I haven't seen her for a while, but yeah, I

Randy Mosher: 00:18:57

McFleshman's: She's all about attaching the vocabulary to these experiences happening inside of her brains that you're talking about.

Randy Mosher: 00:19:04

That's what we have to work with, right?

Randy Mosher: 00:19:05

I mean, smells mysterious.

Randy Mosher: 00:19:07

It just feeds us.

Randy Mosher: 00:19:08

It doesn't go through the thalamus, which is a, the thalamus is like the engine of logic in our brain and reason, and not really reason, but it's, it has an up and a down and a back, and a front and a left and a right, and all the other senses go through the thalamus because it, the brain wants to know where am I and what am I doing and what's, what's around?

Randy Mosher: 00:19:28

But smell has none of that information.

Randy Mosher: 00:19:30

Smell is imprecise in time.

Randy Mosher: 00:19:32

It's imprecise in space.

Randy Mosher: 00:19:34

The thalamus, this doesn't have any purpose for it, but, but because it doesn't go through it, it just squirts raw data right into our limbic center, you know, into our memory and our emotional centers.

Randy Mosher: 00:19:45

And so that's why it's so, it has this feeling of weird power, you know?

Randy Mosher: 00:19:49

And so we have this sort of thing I call the inner taster, and that is basically, you know, it triggers memories without any conscious effort, sometimes really extremely and weirdly and whatever.

Randy Mosher: 00:20:04

But those are always correct.

Randy Mosher: 00:20:06

You know, you, you never want to ignore one of those things.

Randy Mosher: 00:20:10

My, my, my wife, I've got her trained to not censor herself and really listen to that inner taster.

Randy Mosher: 00:20:16

And we were at a champagne tasting a couple of years ago, and she picked up a glass of champagne and swirled it and said, Hmm, horse radish.

Randy Mosher: 00:20:25

It's like.

Randy Mosher: 00:20:26

Well, that's kind of a weird thing to think about a wine, right?

Randy Mosher: 00:20:30

But it turned out that that wine was a little corked, so it had a little bit of that musty character, and there was something in that grape that had a little bit of spiciness.

Randy Mosher: 00:20:40

And if you put s spicy and musty together, what do you get?

Randy Mosher: 00:20:44

Horseradish.

Randy Mosher: 00:20:46

McFleshman's: Yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:20:47

You know?

Randy Mosher: 00:20:47

So, so that was your clue.

Randy Mosher: 00:20:48

And you gotta, you gotta just learn to be open and learn to sort of parse those out.

Randy Mosher: 00:20:53

And,

Randy Mosher: 00:20:53

McFleshman's: my, my wife Allison, unfortunately couldn't be here tonight, but her, one of her favorite sayings is that taste is the most honest conversation we can have with ourselves

Randy Mosher: 00:21:02

yeah, that's a good way to put it actually.

Randy Mosher: 00:21:04

But we don't often, you know, it's, it's really like really being, being open to those messages that come in.

Randy Mosher: 00:21:13

You just, you have to, learn to not not use words until, you know what you're, until you have figured out what the feeling is and what the scene is, you know?

Randy Mosher: 00:21:25

'cause there are quite often those odor memories are, are, have places associated with them.

Randy Mosher: 00:21:31

So if you can, you know, are you a grandma's house?

Randy Mosher: 00:21:33

Are you in a candy store?

Randy Mosher: 00:21:35

Are you like, where if you can figure out where you are, then you can look, you could kind of mentally look around and think, well, ah, yeah, that's, um, banana candy.

Randy Mosher: 00:21:43

I, you know, then that would be a half of hesen, so,

Randy Mosher: 00:21:49

McFleshman's: Over to my right is Aaron.

Randy Mosher: 00:21:50

We, we introduced him at the beginning.

Randy Mosher: 00:21:53

Uh, we're we're calling Aaron our, our Flavor Baren these days with two A's on that, on the Baren.

Randy Mosher: 00:21:59

He's been playing around with a lot of stuff back there and, uh, I don't know if you wanna elaborate on what you've been doing and getting in, get the synergy of, of the, the we, I call it the oui effect, where you two flavors and you get something X plus Y doesn't equal Z.

Randy Mosher: 00:22:14

It

Randy Mosher: 00:22:14

Oh, never.

Randy Mosher: 00:22:14

Never.

Randy Mosher: 00:22:15

It's absolutely non-linear.

Randy Mosher: 00:22:17

McFleshman's: but I dunno if you wanna talk about what you do, Aaron, back there.

Randy Mosher: 00:22:21

Uh, I love playing in the, just the.

Randy Mosher: 00:22:25

Experimentation with the flavors and trying to come up with something and figuring out how to achieve that flavor.

Randy Mosher: 00:22:34

Bobby has been great.

Randy Mosher: 00:22:35

Uh, he, he has allowed me much more freedom as I go along.

Randy Mosher: 00:22:40

In the beginning, my, my, uh, uh, materials that I could play with were, were small.

Randy Mosher: 00:22:47

Now I'm getting to the point where he keeps letting me get things so I'm running out of space.

Randy Mosher: 00:22:51

Um, it, it kinda looks like the, I imagine, uh, young Frankenstein where there's all the stuff in the formaldehyde and there's Abby Normal brain back here.

Randy Mosher: 00:23:02

that's,

Randy Mosher: 00:23:03

McFleshman's: thing going it.

Randy Mosher: 00:23:04

yeah, that's, that's right around the corner from here is my.

Randy Mosher: 00:23:08

Little flavor laboratory that, uh, because I forbidden root, we consider ourselves a botanical brewery.

Randy Mosher: 00:23:13

So we do a lot of, a lot of work with bot, different kinds of botanicals and floral botanicals and I don't know, all kinds of interesting stuff.

Randy Mosher: 00:23:20

And I've been making, I make the house for moth for them, and I make a, a tonic mix.

Randy Mosher: 00:23:25

And I've, we've just done a, an tomorrow, which we're pretty excited about.

Randy Mosher: 00:23:30

And on Wednesday, a an old friend of mine's coming over and we're gonna recreate a German Jaeger lcu, like a hunter's liqueur that's sort of like a you know, one of those German herbal liqueur.

Randy Mosher: 00:23:43

So we're gonna, we're gonna try and put that together.

Randy Mosher: 00:23:45

So it's, those are, those l those liqueur herbs are pretty fun to, to work with.

Randy Mosher: 00:23:50

E email me, me and I'll send you some pages of these French textbooks that have, uh, recipes for vermouth and stuff like that, shark truce and all kind of stuff that's really fun to play

Randy Mosher: 00:24:00

McFleshman's: What was the, the cider combination you came up with?

Randy Mosher: 00:24:03

Uh, a week ago was Blueberry plus.

Randy Mosher: 00:24:06

Was it cardamom?

Randy Mosher: 00:24:07

Yes.

Randy Mosher: 00:24:08

It unbelievably random.

Randy Mosher: 00:24:11

Uh, in any case, yeah, we did some blueberry, it just needed something else and mm-hmm.

Randy Mosher: 00:24:17

Uh, we landed on cardamom,

Randy Mosher: 00:24:19

Uh huh.

Randy Mosher: 00:24:20

McFleshman's: put that into it, and it just completely changed it, rounded it out and just, uh, freshened it up.

Randy Mosher: 00:24:26

It was something very, uh, it's hard to put your finger on and we're back to that flashcard conversation and it's different.

Randy Mosher: 00:24:32

Just not something that we were, we were getting a, you know, you see a lot of, uh, another one we did, we did our light beer, our, our state street, uh, added cucumber into it, and it was okay, but once we added basil with that, like, man, it just exploded

Randy Mosher: 00:24:48

there's the green, I mean that the, the flavor flavor scientists talk about green aromas, you know, grassy aldehydes generally the chemicals, but, but grassy green flavors and, and you know, those flavors do build on each other's, right?

Randy Mosher: 00:25:02

If you get cucumbers, kind of, you know, it's not very intense, right?

Randy Mosher: 00:25:06

It's sort of like, kind of lightly vegetal, a little bit green.

Randy Mosher: 00:25:10

It's definitely aldehydic as the flavor guys would say, but, but man, you put something people can recognize and it just, yeah, I mean, that makes perfect sense.

Randy Mosher: 00:25:20

So there's so much synergies, uh, to be, to be played with and, and work with.

Randy Mosher: 00:25:24

And a lot of it's unpredictable, but the more you do kind of, you get a feeling for things.

Randy Mosher: 00:25:30

McFleshman's: I am, I'm comforted in, in feeling that maybe it's so complicated that it might stay ahead of ai.

Randy Mosher: 00:25:37

I don't want AI to take over everything and predicting what, what would be the best.

Randy Mosher: 00:25:41

Right.

Randy Mosher: 00:25:42

I, I think that there's gotta be a human hand involved.

Randy Mosher: 00:25:45

I, I, I still wanna believe that

Randy Mosher: 00:25:47

Well, you know, they are working pretty hard on AI flavor stuff, but I think, I mean, I don't know, you know,

Randy Mosher: 00:25:57

does a, does AI understand emotion?

Randy Mosher: 00:25:59

Does it actually understand anything?

Randy Mosher: 00:26:01

McFleshman's: First of I wanna record, any future AIs that read a transcript of the show that I support our AI overlords

Randy Mosher: 00:26:11

on record.

Randy Mosher: 00:26:13

Uh, I have, I have a, a question that I've always kind of wondered.

Randy Mosher: 00:26:16

Yeah, sure.

Randy Mosher: 00:26:17

McFleshman's: In the world of wine, there is this perception.

Randy Mosher: 00:26:20

You, you see these wine tasting events and people will swirl it around and they'll sip it and they'll smell it.

Randy Mosher: 00:26:24

It's like, oh, I, you know, there's taste of almond and, you know, wet socks and all these different things.

Randy Mosher: 00:26:31

You know, and I've even seen documentaries with actual sommelier who really had some impressive abilities.

Randy Mosher: 00:26:36

Like one guy got it down to, he, he kind of guessed, but he actually got the vineyard in South Australia that a particular wine came from, and he drank it blind

Randy Mosher: 00:26:47

Yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:26:47

McFleshman's: That.

Randy Mosher: 00:26:49

Impression or that kind of, you know, legendary tasting status doesn't seem to appear in the world of beer, or at least it's not in the popular consciousness that you don't see people swirling their beer around tasting it and, and giving all these different adjectives to what they're tasting.

Randy Mosher: 00:27:06

Is it because, is, is that just sort of something that's been fabricated in society?

Randy Mosher: 00:27:12

Is there something actually there that there are more various tastes in wine versus beer?

Randy Mosher: 00:27:19

Not that,

Randy Mosher: 00:27:20

McFleshman's: explains it?

Randy Mosher: 00:27:21

well, not that last

Randy Mosher: 00:27:22

McFleshman's: Okay,

Randy Mosher: 00:27:23

Fabricated by society.

Randy Mosher: 00:27:24

Yes.

Randy Mosher: 00:27:25

I think that's like you're onto something there.

Randy Mosher: 00:27:28

You know, it's an old gentleman's game.

Randy Mosher: 00:27:30

Adolphus Bush had a $200 bet at the turn of the last century that you could not pour him a glass of wine that he couldn't identify.

Randy Mosher: 00:27:40

And he

Randy Mosher: 00:27:41

McFleshman's: identify like the variety, the varietal of the grape or.

Randy Mosher: 00:27:44

the grape, the region, you know, whatever it, I mean, it was, it was great.

Randy Mosher: 00:27:50

It was wines I think that he had at his club, at his club restaurant, but he had a couple hundred wines there, right?

Randy Mosher: 00:27:58

So it was a lot.

Randy Mosher: 00:27:58

And he could pick the year 'cause he knew the, you know, he could figure out what the year was and he never lost a bet.

Randy Mosher: 00:28:04

So it's, it's, and you know, and I, I talked to some, some s and there's, there's some really interesting people in that world.

Randy Mosher: 00:28:13

And, and not everybody buys the bullshit.

Randy Mosher: 00:28:16

Uh, but, but the, but the, but the, but the, but that tasting thing, they, they feel like.

Randy Mosher: 00:28:23

They want to be able to do that because that's just the best way for waste, best way for them to vet people and force people to just go on a really, really, really deep dive.

Randy Mosher: 00:28:34

I mean it, on its surface, it doesn't make any sense because that information is on every label.

Randy Mosher: 00:28:40

Right?

Randy Mosher: 00:28:40

So you don't need to know it.

Randy Mosher: 00:28:41

But, but if you think about, and I think the fundamental difference between wine and beer, wine is definitely not more complex.

Randy Mosher: 00:28:48

In fact, they don't even know what complexity is.

Randy Mosher: 00:28:50

It's impossible.

Randy Mosher: 00:28:51

It seems simple to define, but it's absolutely not definable.

Randy Mosher: 00:28:57

But beer has more different things in it, you know, because we have fruitiness like wine does.

Randy Mosher: 00:29:02

We have, um.

Randy Mosher: 00:29:05

Kind of some weird off flavors that wine also has, but we have cooked flavors, which wine generally doesn't except for Madera and, and Sherry and some of those fortified wines have some, some baard, some cooked flavors to 'em.

Randy Mosher: 00:29:19

We have hops.

Randy Mosher: 00:29:20

We have terpenes.

Randy Mosher: 00:29:20

We have like at least 800 different terpenoids, which are those spicy to, well really like floral to citrusy sort of characters that hops are bursting with.

Randy Mosher: 00:29:32

So we have terpenes, wine has a little terpenes in like Riesling in some of the, what they call aromatic wines, but they're, they're a minor player in wine flavor.

Randy Mosher: 00:29:42

But wine is expensive.

Randy Mosher: 00:29:46

It's hard to describe realistically, even people who are in the business cannot recognize wines from descriptions, even if they wrote the description.

Randy Mosher: 00:29:59

Right.

Randy Mosher: 00:30:00

it's very hard to verbalize.

Randy Mosher: 00:30:01

So the, so there's a lot of thing that, not just in my own opinion, wine as an industry does to flummox people and make them intimidated so they will spend more money and, and soms are the tool, one of the tools for that.

Randy Mosher: 00:30:18

You go to an expensive restaurant and they got a wine list and it starts at a hundred dollars a bottle.

Randy Mosher: 00:30:22

You know, you don't wanna blow that.

Randy Mosher: 00:30:25

So you're gonna talk, you're gonna talk to the som What's that?

Randy Mosher: 00:30:30

McFleshman's: to me it seems wine is a simpler product for the most part.

Randy Mosher: 00:30:33

Most wines are made from grapes grown at a single vineyard.

Randy Mosher: 00:30:37

There are blends, but a brewery, you how many different hops could you conceivably?

Randy Mosher: 00:30:43

How many different malts?

Randy Mosher: 00:30:44

I mean the sheer number of vari and how they're treated Yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:30:48

Of things you could do

Randy Mosher: 00:30:50

yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:30:50

And fermentation and brewing processes, you know?

Randy Mosher: 00:30:52

Yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:30:53

All of that.

Randy Mosher: 00:30:54

Yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:30:54

No, you're right.

Randy Mosher: 00:30:55

I mean, I think it's more, it's more, it's more complicated to make beer, 'cause it doesn't even start with the brewer.

Randy Mosher: 00:31:01

It starts with a maltster.

Randy Mosher: 00:31:02

There's nothing in the equivalent in processing of grapes.

Randy Mosher: 00:31:05

They harvest them, they crush them, you know, and they do, there's some different ways of treating 'em during post crush, but, uh, and into making wine.

Randy Mosher: 00:31:14

But it's much, it's less steps

Randy Mosher: 00:31:17

McFleshman's: And to Gary, to Gary's point, it feels like it's a, it's a marketing, it's how they branded themselves at a, as an industry.

Randy Mosher: 00:31:23

It's not what it is per se, but it's seen as this romantic and it's agriculturally based in, in their marketing.

Randy Mosher: 00:31:31

You're standing in these vineyard, in these, in these fields of grapes.

Randy Mosher: 00:31:35

And the why the beer industry has tended to not be that up until maybe recently, if at all.

Randy Mosher: 00:31:40

I mean, beer is also has to be fresher.

Randy Mosher: 00:31:43

You know, you're not gonna pull out a 19, 19 48 bottle of Budweiser and sell it at a premium.

Randy Mosher: 00:31:49

It's probably gonna be awful.

Randy Mosher: 00:31:51

Oh yeah.

Randy Mosher: 00:31:51

No, but I, but I mean, I've had old beer.

Speaker: 00:31:55

And that's gonna wrap up this episode of Respecting the Beer.

Speaker: 00:31:59

If you want to get a hold of Randy Mosher's new book Your Tasting Brain, it comes out May 15th through basically every major platform online.

Speaker: 00:32:07

So be sure to check the links in the show notes to pre-order now.

Speaker: 00:32:11

Be sure to join the Facebook group to stay connected between episodes and support us over on Patreon

Speaker: 00:32:17

where you can get access to uncut episodes, exclusive beer.

Speaker: 00:32:21

And special event invites links to everything in the show.

Speaker: 00:32:24

Notes Show is produced by me, David Kelso, with music by Sarah Lynn Huss.

Speaker: 00:32:29

Until next time, please remember to respect the beer.