@bayareaspirits #handcrafted #imbibe

My weekend project (ahem, from 2 weekends ago) was to improve my nosing skills with a homemade nosing quick-class.  So that Sunday, I did a quick inventory check of what I had at home (I already had about half of the items that I needed), then I skipped over to my neighborhood supermarket, Berkeley Bowl, to pick up the remaining items.  The shopping list came out to $30.04 before tax, but if you can get away with not buying sherry ($6.95), toffee candy ($7.49) and/or a big bag of butterscotch chips ($3.65), you could reduce the final cost by more than half.  Compare this to a $200-300 tasting kit and it’s like free.

Prep: I got home and laid out about 25 pieces of glassware on a table.  Then I got down to the business of prepping: cutting fruit, chopping nuts (can’t type that without cringing), pouring liquids, measuring out spices.  Like a Michelin-rated chef wunderkind I went chop-chop-chop-chop-chop-chop.  Amazing.  What would usually take 45 minutes actually seemed like 10 minutes that way I was going.  Or was it the other way around?  Anyways, as I finished with an ingredient, I paid some attention to what glass to put it in — harder-to-clean ingredients in glasses with wider lips, harder-to-smell ingredients in glasses with narrower lips, etc. — then placed a coaster on top to capture the aromas.

Notes & Observations:

Nuts: These were a challenge for me.  Almonds were easy, maybe because I got the toasted kind.  The aroma was overpowering.  But the walnuts, hazelnuts and pecans were tough for me to get a read on.  I thought it might be because I smelled the almonds first, but I went at the other ones again the next day and still, very little registered.  Do I have some kind of genetic olfactory flaw that makes it hard for me to differentiate a walnut from a pecan?!  Thanks mom and dad!

Spices: Fresh, ground pepper is fragrant and sharp.  Cloves were a little off-putting, kind of a cross between cinnamon and anise after they made out on the leather couch.  Nutmeg, amazingly, smelled like very dry lemons.  Definitely not what I was expecting.  That was one note that I filed away for future use.

Fruits: Orange zest vs. orange meat vs. lemon zest.  Orange zest was oiler, the meat of the orange was sweeter, and the lemon zest was acidic, almost like a sour lemon cough drop.  The candy manufacturers nailed this one.  Kudos.  Cantaloupes smelled juicy and sweet whereas apples were lighter, dryer but still sweet and fragrant.  I got very little from blackberries, which was disappointing because I hear this one a lot in tasting notes.  They just don’t have a distinctive smell to me, like a strawberry, raspberry or blueberry does.  Raisins were pungent, like concentrated sugar or molasses.  Honey was very floral.

Candy & Baking: Toffee tasted like butter + salt.  Coffee was toasty with some green rawness.  Butterscotch was like a surge of sugar and condensed milk.  Chocolate shavings vs. cocoa powder.  The best way I can describe this is that the shavings was like a bass, and the cocoa powder was like a treble.  Does that make any sense?  Caramel smelled like butter and burnt sugar.  Brown sugar was a little unexpected, starting off with a raw note, then ending very warm.  Finally, cinnamon was very fragrant and vanilla was sweeter than I expected, but definitely distinct from one another.

Other: Sherry was like a very young wine with a lot of sugar.  Grass from our front yard was earthy and disgusting, mainly because our front yard is earthy and disgusting.  I believe this is what they call ‘terroir’.  Need to use freshly-cut grass for this one.

Takeaways:  So what did I learn?  Did I improve in leaps and bounds?  Can my nose leap tall buildings in a single leap?  I think what I learned was that training a nose or palate isn’t an overnight affair.  It’s not so much a skill, but a memory bank.  It’s repetition and muscle memory, like how great shooters in the NBA perfect their jump shots.  You have to drill it into your memory — a lot of people have already drilled this thousands of times through cooking or tasting or drinking.  I haven’t, that’s why it’s more of a challenge for me.  So this was a worthwhile exercise and a good start.  Oftentimes I describe something as “smelling like brown sugar”….well, what does brown sugar smell like?  Taking it down to another level of granularity is not an easy thing to do.

Smell ya later!