4. Sensory From Below

If concepts borrowed from the likes of Karl Marx give you the vapors, best to skip this one

This is actually the second newsletter I’ve written for this month. The other one will likely get published at some point, but here’s the thing. That newsletter is mostly about environmental macroaggressions such as the “About Us” pages on brewery websites.

This newsletter is instead going to focus on the world-building on which myself and so many other people are focusing, which is what I’ve recently been ideating as “Sensory from Below” or “A People’s Sensory.” 

I’m quite vocal in my criticisms of the hierarchical beer judging world (and, by extension, the certification and beer education worlds). For my male-fragility preface (because I am, after all, a properly trained Midwestern Girl socialized to prioritize the comfort of men over my own comfort and safety), I am not vilifying the people who volunteer their time to create beer style guidelines or structures around events and competitions. They are not Bad Men™ who are (usually) actively gatekeeping. They saw a need in the nascent beer judging community and developed a resource. If you weren’t aware, the first beer style guidelines were developed over 25 years ago and derived from the New England Homebrew Guidelines developed by Steve Stroud, Pat Baker, and Betty Ann Sather. Those have evolved to be a resource used in a variety of ways in the beer industry. That is not a bad thing.

The beer industry is currently in a liminal state. There is a subset of us who are no longer willing to abide by the structures that were built by mostly white men who could afford the capital investment of opening a brewery and/or creating the credentials they hold. I’m fortunate to spend the majority of my time largely surrounded by people who share the same goals for the industry.

To be sure and very clear, the majority of the industry is more than happy to keep on keepin’ on with the ways the industry has been. For them, making the few women who work for them wear matching shirts and pose for a brewhouse picture during March but never posting about Black History Month because “they don’t want to get it wrong” is allyship to the max. Walking into the CBC Trade Show in Denver in 2021 to see a branding company that ponied up major money for a corner booth near the entrance only to bedeck it almost exclusively in Founders merch? Fuck me and everyone else who says #FuckFounders, I guess.¹ That message had the same effect as someone suddenly clanging hand cymbals into my ears.

But we’re not talking about that group because we’re not that group and honestly, I’ve found going rogue much more effective than being voluntold to be an activist board member or otherwise having my time volunteered to educate people too lazy to do a simple Google search.

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While completing my Applied Sensory and Consumer Science certificate program, I often asked questions about how sensory science would look different if it were more inclusive, specifically in beer sensory. One of my professors responded by saying that outcomes were largely the same when a more diverse sample population was used. 

Hmmmm, were they really though? Or was no actual work done to create a sense of trust and mutual respect such that the people participating felt comfortable sharing their cultural sensory experiences and instead opted to default to generally accepted language built by a largely homogenous group?

This surfaced in my brain again a few days ago when I read “The Value of Building Community Power Through Research” in the Anti-Racism Daily (ARD) newsletter.² I’ll let you read the entire post yourself (and subscribe to the ARD while you’re at it if you don’t already - link below), but the gist is that historically excluded communities are underrepresented in research. Models such as Participatory Action Research (PAR) can help address those issues by shifting the power dynamic to designate historically excluded groups as the subject matter experts in their lived experiences. 

How can we apply this framework to sensory, specifically beer sensory? I have a few ideas I am working on but this is an open-ended question for our beer community to brainstorm. Some of my ideas seemed radical at first even to me, but I keep turning them over in my head. 

The idea to offer free beer judge training came after seeing only two women accept medals at the 2019 National Homebrew Competition in Portland. How do we get more women to walk across the stage at national beer competitions? I grew more confident in my abilities as a homebrewer after the first time I judged a homebrew competition and experienced the range of quality in beer competitions (homebrew and professional). Having more women as beer judges would mean that more women may have an experience similar to mine and that may bolster their confidence in entering competitions. 

But then I realized that competitions are all about hierarchy and dominance. Sound familiar? I had to rethink my goals.

Is the goal really to have more women and non-binary people competing alongside men? Or is the goal to have more historically excluded groups involved in building our sensory lexicons? If we don’t build our palates through judging in competitions, then how do we gain experience?³ What if guidelines shifted from being decided by an extremely small, extremely homogenous group to instead reflecting the palates of larger groups of people? 

Is there a community-based approach we can create instead? What if we focused not on participating in structures that weren’t created with us in mind and aren’t designed for us to succeed but rather created a new community centered around people as the subject matter experts in their lived experiences? What would that look like? 

Feel free to brainstorm in the comments below or reply to this newsletter with your thoughts.

1. Seriously, #FuckFounders

2. Subscribe to the daily newsletter or weekly digest here.

3. According to Neuroenology, the maximum number of components both experienced and novice wine tasters can correctly identify in complex mixtures is three. That’s it. The biggest differentiator between wine experts and wine novices is experience. The more experience you have, the more memories you build of whether what you are tasting “seems like” what you should expect. Hence, most expert tasting notes are drawn largely from the memories of what something should "taste like.” When I say descriptive vocabulary is a farce we’ve collectively agreed upon, this is why.