BJCP Sensory Kit Club Meeting

Hey guys,

I'm planning on organizing a few homebrew club meetings around the Sensory Kit and am not sure how split up the off-flavors between the three meetings. There's 24 vials total, so I figured I'd do 8 for each meeting, unless there's a better way to organize the vials. Does anyone have a good suggestion on how to split these up? Thanks!

That's a lot of flavors/tastings to do in one night. How often do you meet? I'd go to 4 or fewer and do it over the course of 6 months or so. Have you purchased the kit yet? There are many good ways to get those flavors into beer without buying the expensive kit.

++Have you already got the kit? There was a backorder when we got it for my BJCP class last year...the guy running the class ordered it months in advance and still had trouble getting it.

You might also take a look at the beer doctoring guidelines in the BJCP exam study guide.



As to how to organize it, I *think* we did all the off flavors in one class, but I could be wrong about that. I would think you'd want to at least group them so you get all the variations of e.g. oxidative flavors in one shot, and then another group where you could do all the examples of flavors that typically result from fermentation issues, etc.

One thing I do remember is that we had a class where a local commercial brewer came in with samples of a couple batches of their beer that had developed some off flavors and talked about them, which was very useful in identifying sources of those off flavors and also excellent practice for judging. The doctored beers you typically get in the BJCP tasting exam have rather high levels of the off flavor(s) you are supposed to identify; these were much more subtle.

Oh really? I figured we could get away with 8 a meeting, maybe we could do 4-6. We meet about once every 6 weeks. One member already has the kit on hand so we're good to go!