Sensory training

Understanding flavour starts with understanding your palette, which is why at Mad Squirrel we do sensory training with our brewers.

This isn’t just about learning to spot off-flavours or naming every hop in a lineup, it’s about knowing your own sensitivity to flavour and how that shapes your preferences and your perception of a beer.

Are you extra sensitive to bitterness? Less tuned in to sweetness? Prefer fruits or spices? Insight into your own palate profile helps you understand why certain beers land the way they do for you, and why your interpretation of a beer and your preferences might not be the same as someone else’s.

And that’s where the real value of team tasting comes in.

Knowing how the other brewers perceive flavour — what they’re sensitive to, what they tend to seek out or avoid — helps turn tasting notes into real insight. It gives context to their feedback, and creates a more balanced, informed brewing process. Here at Mad Squirrel we harness this and develop our beers as a brewing team.

Taste is obviously subjective, we have different sensitivities to flavour types and prefer different balances of those flavours, but with training and awareness, we can make it a powerful tool for making better beer, together.