In this special episode, we sit down with the legendary Randy Mosher, a renowned beer expert, author, and brewing visionary. From his groundbreaking books like Tasting Beer to his latest research on how we perceive taste and aroma, Randy shares fascinating insights into the science behind beer appreciation.
We talk about his journey from homebrewer to one of the most influential beer writers, how our senses of taste and smell work and why they matter, and the role of perception, memory, and language in beer tasting. We also explore how brewing traditions and creativity shape the global beer scene.
During our conversation, we enjoy a smoked wheat beer from Poland, discuss different beer styles, and dive into the art and science of flavor in a way only Randy Mosher can…
Kommt in unsere Facebook-Gruppe und diskutiert mit: https://www.facebook.com/groups/bierakademie
Link für Apple/iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/biertalk/id1505720750
Link für Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7FWgPXstFr1zR9Fm2G0UJS
BierTalk – Gespräche über und beim Bier.
Markus Raupach: Hello, and welcome to another episode of our podcast BierTalk. Today I’m very happy, I’m sitting here in Poland, Krakow, together with one of my beer idols, to be honest, and one of the guys who has maybe the most books on my beer shelf. It’s Randy Mosher from the United States. I’ll start maybe on tasting beer but also a little about the books, and he’s working on a new one. We had great speech with him today. So we’re sitting here and want to talk a little bit to him. First of all, thank you very much for having you here.
Randy Mosher: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to people.
Markus Raupach: Perfect. Yes, maybe you introduce yourself a little to our listeners, and then we continue our talk?
Randy Mosher: I spent a career in web design and advertising, and eventually that sort of folded into my life as involved with brewing and breweries and brewing design and then eventually into writing. But I started home brewing in the middle 1980s and read the Michael Jackson book, which was like sticking my finger in the socket and just electrifying in full so many possibilities, at a time when the US brewing was completely boring. There was no interesting beer being made, almost none, really, anywhere. So we started brewing Belgian beers out of Michael Jackson’s book, because that book has so much detail. You really can brew a Witbeer, a Saison or a Tripel or whatever. So we just got really excited about the possibilities. The first beers were terrible, and then they got better. Then eventually I was lucky enough to find someone who wanted to publish my messy pile of notes that I had created as my brewing workbook and turned that into a book called The Brewer’s Companion. It was a very, very flawed book, but it had a lot of information and some of the things I had, like Rheinisch Westfalen and things like that, they were very technical from old brewing books and historical things that people found really fascinating that they had not seen before. I was just using old books and finding all the technical stuff and putting that in the thing. Then really about that, that was early 1990s. I left my job in an advertising agency and started freelancing. At that time a lot of people I knew from brewing, knew that I could do design work and they were starting breweries and said, hey, Randy, can you do some design work for me? Then eventually my work became all design. Then at some point I wrote Radical Brewing, because I had been writing for All About Beer magazine for maybe ten or fifteen years, and had lots of articles about, you know, twelve ways to make a Christmas beer, and how to pervert a lager, like all these kind of. I was trying to find things to say that were unique and interesting. I combined that all together and made Radical Brewing, which we’re just getting published in Poland here next week. So I’m very excited. Poland and Brazil are the only places outside of the US, and so I’m very proud of that. Then we eventually got hooked up with Ray Daniels through our home brewing club and he and I did a lot of things. We almost started a brewery together in the 1990s. But we started teaching some classes at the Siebel Institute. They had never taught any classes on beer styles. In the whole hundred-year history of Siebel, nobody really cared about beer styles. The breweries that were largely larger, mid-sized breweries, were sending their people, they didn’t really care whether people knew about styles, because they only made what they made. And those breweries were just not interested in being innovative, particularly. Then we turned that course into a somewhat simplified course for people in distribution and bar management and things like that. That outline, my PowerPoint deck, became the outline for Tasting Beer. And then, you know, now, now I’m a writer and people are inviting me places, like you, get to go to all these fabulous places and meet people and judge beer and it’s been a fabulous life.
Markus Raupach: Yes. It’s a fantastic journey and to be honest, I also started with multimedia and a company making advertising and things like that. Of course then you come across them, then you have the beer and you have all the stories behind, so that’s something you really have to do. I’m very happy because I also have some beers which I brought from our Polish friends here. We had four of them and you selected the Royal Weizen, so the smoked wheat beer. Of course, I’m happy, because I’m from Bamberg and we are these smoky guys. You haven’t been there yet, but maybe we will make it happen in the future.
Randy Mosher: Yes.
B: But at least we have something that is a little Bambergian, maybe. Let’s hope so.
Randy Mosher: Let’s hope so, yes.
Markus Raupach: So here we go. At least it sounds and looks familiar.
Randy Mosher: Fantastic. Nice head around it. Nice haze. I can smell the smoke from here.
Markus Raupach: Here we go.
Randy Mosher: Well, cheers.
B: Cheers. Prost. Nastrovje, prost. Yes, just to have it complete, the brewery is called Browar #Zamiestem# and the beer. I hope I pronounce it right, is Wędzony. That more or less means smoked wheat beer.
Randy Mosher: Okay, so, yes.
Markus Raupach: If you get it, dear audience, you can taste it with us. As you write a book called Tasting Beer, what will you say about this, what is in your glass?
Randy Mosher: I love the big head on it. You know, of course the haze sort of comes along with wheat beers. It’s got a very nice phenolic yeast component, which I think blends really nicely with the smoke. It makes the smoke a little like integrates the smoke in with the beer somehow a little better. Sometimes the smoke beers, the smoke is so different from beer smell, that they can seem like two different things that happen to be in the same glass, not that that’s completely bad, but I like that integration. The smoke level is fairly nice here. It doesn’t obscure the beer too much and it’s a very pleasant texture in the mouth. I love wheat beers. If I were doing my own brewery, making what I would want, it would be all wheat beers, because I just really find wheat beers fascinating and tasty.
Markus Raupach: I always say, everybody likes a banana in a barbecue. So this is perfect. To be honest, it’s always so interesting about the smoke level, because the same as in Grodziskie, but also in Bamberg, the smoke breweries produce their own malt the old way. So these are malts really with a high level of smoke, but very nicely integrated, and that produces really nice beers. So yes, that’s of course my ground, I love it, and I’m happy that you love it too. So that’s perfect. That brings us to your topic you are researching or working on a new book at the moment and it all started more or less with the question, how do we taste? What are your findings? How can we say now, how does it work? How does a human get into the secrets of taste and smell?
Randy Mosher: Right, well, they’re called the chemical senses, right? That’s what scientists call them. So that’s taste, smell, mouth feel. So taste: obviously: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, maybe a few other things in some ways, but fairly complicated. But those are the primary ones and very different. They don’t blend together. We have sometimes even multiple different receptors and processing systems for managing them. Even though, say, for example, salt and sour, extremely simple, is just ions, measuring ions. The systems that do that are extremely complicated, and they’ve only really recently figured out what they are. They’re about 100% sure on salt. They know there’s two, but they think there’s another one, because when they take out those two, there’s still some salt taste left. So there’s still a lot of mysteries. So then there’s that, and then there’s mouth feel, which is basically as touch sensations primarily in your mouth and in your nose, and they respond both to actual physical stimulation as well, so things like tannins, astringency can be felt as sort of friction or lubrication. Our brains are able to turn those things into sensations, right? And then also heat and cold and also not just heat and cold but those feelings of sensations as neural impulses, really, can be transmitted, stimulated by menthol and chilli pepper and mustard and various types of chemicals that interact with those receptors. So it’s called chemesthesis. It’s a very interesting thing to have a texture, like a touch sensor that should be actually influenced by some chemistry. So that’s why we get all those things. Then smell is the most complicated by far. There are 400 receptors. Every one of us is a little different, but not so different that we can’t share gastronomy in beers and things. But we all have different sensitivities, and there’s certain compounds that are well known: the buttery compound that you might find in a poorly brewed beer, of diacetyl. About 10% of people are actually blind to that, so that’s an important part, judging or learning to be a taster, sort of calibrating yourself. Which is why judging beer is really great, because you can compare yourself to other people at your tables when you’re judging and you know, well, yeah, I’m just not that sensitive to that. Or maybe you’re super-sensitive to metallic or something, you know, everybody’s a little different. But those integrate really rapidly in the brain. As soon as they enter the brain they go through in their early processing station and then immediately they start to flow together. That creates what we call flavour. That’s what they call a multi-modal sensation, right? That’s multi different sensory modes that all kind of come together to create a single impression. That’s flavour. That’s what flavour is. So part of the job as a taster is to learn to separate those things out. Because if you pick up a glass of wine, for example, and you put it to your nose and you say, ah, it’s sweet! It can’t be sweet through the nose. It can only be fruity, right? But your brain already knows, almost always, if there’s some fruitiness, there’s often sweetness, certainly with actual fruit, not necessarily true with wine, but with actual fruit, that’s our learned association. Really, you have to fight those a little bit sometimes. Fruit’s not that hard. There’s some other things that may be more difficult. So this is one of those tricks that you have to learn.
Markus Raupach: That’s quite a complicated process and quite a complex thing, because on the one hand, it’s a bit like learning a new language, so because you maybe learn new words for things or in general new smells, new chemical compositions, whatever. On the other hand, you have to reframe things you already know or you already had. For example, diacetyl, if you were a big popcorn lover, you’re maybe very happy with this, and then you have to learn, okay, if it’s in a beer, it’s maybe different, and with other things, the same thing. So really, it’s not so easy to get into that.
Randy Mosher: Even diacetyl in the beer, it tastes very different in a pale beer than in a dark beer.
Markus Raupach: Yes.
Randy Mosher: I find myself, if I’m tasting a dark beer and my brain starts thinking about pastry or some dessert, I have to catch myself and think: that’s probably diacetyl, so if you think about brown baked products with butter, that’s baked goods. So that’s your brain saying, this is a baked good, but actually, it’s beer, you know. Again, you have to kind of learn those little tricks to know, because you have to learn different chemicals in different contexts and so on.
Markus Raupach: Yes. And also we will, I think, talk about that in a moment, but you have also this different concentration and things. But first maybe the general question, we were talking about how we taste, but the question is: why? Is there a reason? Because we could also just not taste and live anyway, or not?
Randy Mosher: We could, but it would be really boring. People who are born without a sense of smell can live their lives just fine. But people who have a sense of smell and they lose it for some reason, they have a very high rate of depression and even suicide, because it’s just really missing a part of their world, and it’s a missing part of world that’s a really good communication between fellow human beings. So you go out to a bar and drink some beer, eat some food, you talk about it, you share it, and it’s like people who lose their hearing, they become socially isolated sometimes in ways that they don’t really always realise, you know, that that can be very isolating, and it can lead to dementia and can lead, like all these things have knock-on effects that are important. So it’s just like you want to live your life, you want to experience things and you want to pay attention to what’s around you, and that’s just another tool for it.
Markus Raupach: Yes. That’s more or less in the modern society. But is there also a more basic reason? Do we need it as beings?
Randy Mosher: We do. The earliest creature, there’s not a creature, there’s not a species of animal that’s ever lived on this planet that does not have a chemical sense. Before there were bacteria, you know, whatever was before bacteria, the last universal common ancestor, it had a sense of taste, smell, something, because it could sense a gradient in its environment and if it was food, it could move towards it. The sensory part of the cell was directly in the little motor that powers the flagellum that propels the creature. So a positive smell drives it towards it and a negative smell, it turns the other way and it backs up. That’s the function of smell today, for everybody, for all creatures great and small, it’s that function. So when you find it sometimes with your sense of smell, you know, you really want a word and it’s giving you a feeling. You know, that’s things you have to learn. But that’s what it, don’t blame your sense of smell, because that’s what it’s for. That’s how it works. So you have to understand that. That was one of the more amazing revelations to me. It’s like yeah, we’re all creatures have that in one way or another.
Markus Raupach: So generally we react to our environment, if we have something attractive like food, or other attractive things?
Randy Mosher: Sex, yes.
Markus Raupach: We are drawn to it and we like that. But maybe is there a difference between, I think, many animals like, let’s have a bee, or something, that flies where it’s sweet, or something like that. I think humans are a little bit able to control. Of course, when I’m shopping for food when I’m hungry, I shop differently if I’m not. But still, I do not eat immediately in the supermarket.
Randy Mosher: Yes, of course. Yes, very, very differently. I mean, you know, the less evolutionary advancement there is in a creature, the more direct the connexions are between their senses and their reactions. Even mice and rats, and other mammals, like a rat when it’s not hungry can’t smell food. So literally, the sense of smell, just the sensitivity drops way out. The same with salt. If they need salt, the salt tastes really good, and it’s very sensitive. But at some point the salty taste goes away and they don’t need it. We don’t work that way, because another big discovery, from reading all this research, is that human beings and our ape cousins, and some other animals too, can they transfer functions that in smaller creatures are done in more autonomic ways, with the brain stem and with the lower limbic parts of the brain, and direct connexions between sensation and action. Whereas in humans, we can smell food even when we’re not hungry, but, you know, and monkeys can do that too. There’s ripe fruit on the tree, and a monkey swings by and it’s like, oh, that smells really good, but I’m not hungry right now. But I know where it is. I’m going to make a note of that, I’ll come back when I’m hungry. So that’s like the cognitive brain taking over for and even some basic things like the sense of salt, we manage that with our cognitive brains. Other animals, they have to have it, you know, but we know that, we’re hairless creatures, we sweat to cool off, we lose salt faster and differently than most other animals. So it’s beneficial to us if we know we’re going to go out and run all day chasing gazelles, we’ve got to load up on salt. Like the football players they give salt pills to in high school. They used to, anyway. So we can manage that, because our brains can do that for us, right? We can think about what we do.
Markus Raupach: Yes, so it’s like a new dimension that we add on that we can say, okay, maybe I come back to eat that later, or whatever.
Randy Mosher: It just gives us so much adaptability and the flexibility to interact with the world in really complex ways that are advantageous for us.
Markus Raupach: If I come across a lot of modern people which are more or less living in their houses, going to work in another house always in the close surroundings, maybe they have perfumes or things like that, but not like a natural environment. So do these people lose their natural senses? Or can they come back if you train that? How does that work?
Randy Mosher: No, they’re still there. Part of the problem is that we don’t depend on our sense of smell very much in the industrialised world. We enjoy it. We use it, we drink wine, you know, we engage with it, but it’s not a matter of survival for us any more. Whereas people in the wild, you know, they’re chasing animals, they can smell, they can tell where they’ve been. They can smell where they’ve been, they look for all the other things, visual signs and sounds and all that, but they depend highly on those senses. So they’re more tuned in, for sure. But our receptors are one of the few places of our nervous systems that actually get replaced frequently. So within about two or three weeks, if you were to move from the city to live out in the country, you would have some different receptors. You’d have some different capabilities just based on what you were smelling out there.
Markus Raupach: That is interesting. So, for example, a long time I had a dog and it was able to really follow routes, trace smells.
Randy Mosher: Mm-hmm?
Markus Raupach: Would you say humans are able to do that too?
Randy Mosher: It’s been demonstrated, that humans can, there’s some science papers where they would take a rag and put some chocolate sauce on it and drag it around a field and then put blindfolded people on their hands and knees and they send them through the field. And they can just zigzag, they swing their head from side to side to see which side the smell is stronger. Then they go in that direction, they take little sniffs, like dogs sniff, you know, just short sniffs, because sniffs are actually a mechanism to trigger neural synchronisation between parts of the brain. It’s not just intaking air. It’s actually a neural event that synchronises all the different parts that are communicating with each other. So it tells the brain, like: get into smelling mode right now. So humans have done really well and with a little practice they get really good. Are they as good as bloodhounds? I don’t know. Probably not. But, you know.
B: Not as bad as you think?
Randy Mosher: We’re much better than we think we are. Most people generally don’t think they’re very good at it, and it’s not because of their genes. It’s because they don’t put a lot of effort into it and don’t think about it on a day-to-day, moment-to-moment basis. You have to really focus on smell, essentially.
Markus Raupach: You said it’s 400 receptors?
Randy Mosher: Mhm.
Markus Raupach: Also we already added a little, that they are also reacting to different concentrations.
Randy Mosher: Mm-hmm.
Markus Raupach: But if I think, let’s say, about a pineapple or an apple or a piece of chocolate, I think, in this I have the apple in my internal eyes. How does that work? How does the body translate the receptors into, let’s say, an apple?
Randy Mosher: Well, each chemical may stimulate multiple receptors and different receptors, as the concentration goes up and down. And then each receptor can recognise, can bind to different chemicals. An apple has a whole bunch of different esters, there’s closely related receptors that can all smell those esters. That transmits a sort of, I almost think about it like a digital grid of responses into your brain from different receptors. information in the face, but because it’s recognition. I see you and I know you now, and next time I see you, a whole bunch of memories about talk and everything else I know about you will come back. But the face itself is just a signifier for it. It contains no real information, in and of itself. So it’s really interesting the way it does it. That gives you flavours that are very hard to pull apart. Coca-Cola is made of lemon, orange blossom, lime, coriander, nutmeg and cinnamon. It doesn’t smell like any of those things. But when you put them all together in the right ratios, your brain just clicks, because it doesn’t store the chemistry, it just stores that combined thing.
Markus Raupach: That also means, if you come back to the example of the apple, that’s like a universal language, because even if my receptors are a bit different to yours, if we both have the idea, this is an apple, we can talk about it.
Randy Mosher: Exactly. Exactly. So despite our genetic differences and our other differences too, we easily share because we’re sharing psychological things about value and what this is and what’s appropriate and how it’s supposed to taste. And you’ve probably got a template for different varieties of apples. The people that know wine, they have thousands of templates for different kinds of wine, different kinds of grapes, in different regions, at different seasons, with different weather. Their level of detail of all of that stuff, their sort of index file, like index cards of all these things, that’s how they organise them, is by variety, region and then weather and terroir things. So it can really be as complex as I mean, it can be incredibly complex, as wine is, because it’s related to terroir and varietal and everything. In beer we think of the styles, and styles and, you know, German styles are a little different in Germany than they are in the US, but not always. They don’t have to be. But they sometimes are. So it’s a little different. It’s a little different. But those sort of are, what? Our language. That plus off flavours and sort of quality-related flavours that are important to know, as brewers, to know what the flaws are and how to recognise them in different contexts and when some phenol is appropriate and when it’s not appropriate and all of that kind of thing.
Markus Raupach: That is really interesting for me right now, because in the beer education, I try to find a new approach to talking about the beer styles thing. If you look at, let’s say, the BJCP or something like that, you have always these guidelines with numbers and things. I normally tend to explain to people the idea of the beers type: why was it invented, where it was coming from, what was the surroundings, the idea, how it was enjoyed, all about that beer. Really, my finding is, that it’s somehow this is easier, because if people understand what the idea of a style is, it’s maybe easier for them to judge it because they have pictures in mind and they can see if what they have in the mouth is according to that.
Randy Mosher: Yes.
Markus Raupach: It’s much easier than to guess about IBUs or things like that. Maybe, I don’t know.
Randy Mosher: I think the other thing that’s really important about beer, and I didn’t really mention it, is that beer is incredibly process-oriented. Every aspect of beer, you know, certainly in agriculture, but we think about that less except for hops, which we’re very agriculture is very much, like grapes, in the forefront. We think about it less with malt. But malt comes into the malthouse all one thing and it leaves earlier we were just talking to Weyermann, they make 88 different kinds of products. It’s like, wow, all out of more or less kind of the same stuff. But those are all the cooking process. So understanding every part of the brewing process, starting with how the malt is made, and understanding where the flavours come from, in very pale kiln malts and then darker malts and caramel malts and black malts and all of those things, they each have some chemistry, they each have some process, they have certain characteristics, different other ways they behave, and then once you get into the brewing process, it’s exactly the same way: how you mesh, how you boil, when you put the hops in, you know. So understanding those processes gives you that insight, that’s the context part of the way we categorise flavours. The people who are really good at this, they can smell a beer and they can go and write down a recipe for it and figure out pretty much how to get something that’s pretty similar in the glass, and then people who get that way with experience.
Markus Raupach: What is a bit fun is that this is about the same answer I get if I talk to a German brewer about the purity law, because they say, and it’s totally right, that if you know about the process, if you know about the raw materials, about everything, you can make so many different beers that it’s simply not necessary to put a marshmallow into your beer. That’s their common thing.
Randy Mosher: We make a marshmallow. We don’t actually use marshmallows. We have a toasted marshmallow Schwarzbier. We make it for a big brewery in Chicago. I just, like, why would a chef not use basil or, I don’t know, the whole, I understand how it came about and I understand people’s love for the restriction. Because sometimes restriction really can improve our beer. If you can do just anything, it’s harder, in a way. But I don’t adhere to that. I would rather, maybe that’s just my American nature. Don’t tell me what to do, you know, I talked to the owner of IENA one time and he said, you know, we have a tax form that has check boxes for styles. If we want to make something that doesn’t have a check box, we can’t do it. It’s like, I would not want to live like that. I guess that, you know, it’s sort of the double-edged sword of tradition, that on the one hand it’s really comforting and nice and there’s this great quality of knowing things have been around forever. But on the other hand, people want to innovate. They want to express themselves somehow, and it’s very hard to do that, you know, with a Pilsner. You can a little, but boy, it’s really subtle. I don’t know. It’s like different points of view about it.
Markus Raupach: Maybe the key is to have both of that. So on one side to …
Randy Mosher: I don’t have a problem with that. Yes.
Markus Raupach: Yes, to be really aware of all of the processes of the raw materials, and on the other side to have the whole bunch of ingredients and things and if you do that, you get that, then you can really create fantastic beers. I always have.
Randy Mosher: You never don’t need to understand the process, and when you get into understanding, like when you start working with fruits and botanicals and those kinds of things, it’s even more complicated, because each one of those has its own set of chemistry. Peaches for example. There’s a chemical in peaches that the food scientists call ‘fuzzy peach smell’. It’s unstable in fermentation, right? It just like oxidises, or something, and goes away in fermentation. Which is why peach beers are kind of terrible. But if you know that, you know that, and then so we do a lot of research and when we do things, we really try and understand them pretty deeply so that when we’re working with them, we’re working with information and not just tossing stuff in.
Markus Raupach: Yes. If you say ‘we’, so you are involved at a brewery?
Randy Mosher: I’ve been involved in a brewery called Forbidden Root in Chicago. We have two brewery restaurants in Chicago. We have a brewery restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, and then we also put some beer on the market, some brewed at our own places, and for our larger brands we have those contracted in a larger, better, more quality-oriented brewery than we can manage in a pub down in central Illinois.
Markus Raupach: As you have now made all this research for your new book and have these fantastic findings we were just talking about, did that change your approach to the beers in the brewery or to the food in the restaurant or in general your personal tasting, drinking, eating? Did you have some changes?
Randy Mosher: Well, for instance, we’d made a peach beer, I just talked about peaches. I thought, our distributor thought we might have an opportunity for another beer besides our strawberry basil Hefeweizen, because it’s a big seller for us. So we thought, well, what else can you make from Eckhaus Dorf. It’s like, I’m thinking about a peach beer. But again, the problem is, peaches, the peachy character goes away, so we have to fix that. So the first thing we did is we put in a Chinese tree flower called sweet osmanthus. It has a beautiful peachy aroma to it. They use it for tea. So we put that in a cold side post-fermentation, so now we don’t have to worry about fermentation taking the chemical out of there. Then I consulted a big book called Flavor Creation, written by a famous food scientist flavourist, and they suggested in that book some natural flavour like essential oils and other natural flavours that are used sometimes in peach flavourings. And we looked at the whole list. We tried a bunch of things, and we ended up with jasmine, chamomile, orange peel, rose, mahleb, which is a Middle Eastern cherry pit, and sweet Osmanthus. I’m sorry, it’s the sweet osmanthus I mentioned and the other one was orris root, which is the Florentine iris, which has like a violet, it’s this very profound, deep, vague, fruitiness that has long length on the palate. So these are our flavours to sort of dance around the edge of peach flavour. What we found is not only did we help strengthen the peach and we brought some of the peach back with that osmanthus, but that each one of those flavour notes add elements of interest and complexity to the beer. So it drinks a little more like wine, even though it’s a Belgian Witbeer style as the base. It has the complexity of a wine where you notice one thing and then you notice another thing and then you notice another thing. And it also brings a lot greater length in the mouth, even though it’s a 5% beer, but it layers in the mouth a little bit in really interesting ways and the flavours change as it goes through it.
Markus Raupach: Wow. That is impressive. I think the audience and myself, we all are now eager to come to Chicago and visit the brewery and the places. In general, about your new book, are there some other things you want to mention? What are you planning to do? Maybe, how can we maybe get it? Is there a date, or something?
Randy Mosher: Well, my publisher has decided after six years of work that it’s too long.
B: Okay!
Randy Mosher: Not six years is too long, the book’s too long, so I’m waiting for an email from them saying, are we publishing this book? Not publishing? Like: what’s going on with the book? It will be, chances are, early 2026 before we’re done. So the university publisher, they move very slowly, but we wanted that imprimatur of respectability and, you know, that this is coming from a reputable source. I’m really ready to be done working on it. It’s basically the first four, five chapters are really about the science of taste feel, mouth feel, a section on how we organise smells, a section on language, a section on how the smells combine, or how the senses combine, then there’s a chapter on flavour chemistry. So I’ve started to learn to think in chemical terms, in terms of esters and aldehydes and other compounds. That’s another language for me. And that’s like, I’m applying that to wine, I’m applying that to beer, and just making sure that I understand, oh, if I get something that’s sort of grassy or maybe a little fatty, it’s probably an aldehyde. Then you can understand like how aldehydes get formed during various parts of the plant growth, the fermentation and different kinds of things. It’s again, just a different way of having insight. Then there’s a chapter on fermented beverages, a chapter on distilled beverages, and then two chapters at the end, one of which focuses on how tasting is done professionally with taste panels and different kinds of biases that are accounted for by different methods during tasting. Then the final chapter is: all right, you want to be a taster? This is what your journey is going to look like. Here’s some things you need to think about. I put beer and food back there, because it just seemed like the logical place. Glassware, there’s a limited amount of studies, almost nothing on beer, honestly, that seems to be worth anything. But a little bit on wine. There’s not a huge amount of knowledge there about that. Very limited science on glassware, although I think psychologically it’s hugely important, because it sets expectations in certain ways.
As brewers, half of our job is managing people’s expectations in a way that when they finally taste our beer, they have the right frame of mind to not be intimidated, to not be worried about it, to just like really embrace it and enjoy it. I think that part of that communication, some people are like: no, no, no, let them figure it out for themselves. But it’s very important to frame it properly and talk, using language very carefully in your imagery and whatever, to prepare people for what their experience is going to be like.
Markus Raupach: Perfect. We are almost done with our beer, so we will enjoy the last sip. Thank you very much. You will be a little bit longer here in Poland, so what are you expecting from the Polish beer?
Randy Mosher: A few days where we judge beer. We judged Best of Show, so we really had a very good, like a cross-section of the best of Polish beer. We were quite impressed with everything. It’s been really fun being here. I love the community here. It’s been very enthusiastic, a lot of energy, a lot of creativity, people really, really want this to be successful. I’m just looking forward to some traditional food and maybe some more modern food and a tour around and just have the experiences of being in Krakow for a while. I’m really excited to be here. I will just tell people that if I’m starting to, I’m getting very close to publishing a weekly, or bi-weekly newsletter on the book and some of my travels. So if they want to sign up, they can go to RandyMosher.com and just click through and sign up for it. Or if they want to contact me for any reason, I’m very available, and they can get me on that site as well.
Markus Raupach: Perfect. So I will put the link also in the show notes and I already signed up for the newsletter, so please do.
Randy Mosher: Fantastic.
Markus Raupach: Thank you very much and yes, let’s have another beer. Bye.
Randy Mosher: Yes!
BierTalk – Der Podcast rund ums Bier. Alle Folgen unter www.biertalk.de.