Lost in Translation — How Flavor Wheels and Tasting Tools Can Evolve to Speak with Global Beer Drinkers

Whenever Doug Merlo, an experienced beer judge and Bräu Akademie Beer Sommelier course instructor in Brazil, teaches, he quickly runs into a translation problem. When his students taste beers, they get the “citrus, pineapple, mango, lime—universal fruits in the American way to think,” he says. “But it’s incredible how in [some] varieties of hops we can smell Amazonic fruits. Amazonic fruits are not in the [beer flavor] wheel.” 

Those beers might very well taste like pitanga, carambola, and acerola, or other local ingredients that his students name—but there are few, if any, popular instructional or reference guides that would affirm their impressions. “It’s Brazilian fruits,” Merlo says. “I can’t explain to another person outside of Brazil what is [the flavor of] pitanga, carambola, acerola. They need to taste them.” 

Since the 1970s, international beer’s educational tools, courses, style guides, and tasting notes have been defined by a broadly Western palate, one biased towards the kinds of ingredients that are grown in places like the U.S. and the U.K., or at least readily available via major supermarkets. Most beer flavor wheels or flavor maps today are composed of a set number of these “common” ingredients or descriptors. As widely used tools, they are designed to refine an industry lexicon, to help with communication, and to provide a universal reference point for the language of flavor. But as Merlo’s example makes plain, that supposedly universal application really reflects a narrower band of experience than many care to admit, one that certainly doesn’t speak to all beer drinkers around the globe. 

Now, as more small breweries open in places which previously didn’t have a craft beer culture, and as more drinkers from more diverse backgrounds come to beer, there’s a new movement to broaden the terms we use, to be more inclusive in our flavor language, and to decolonize our tasting tools.

Visions of what that could look like vary. We could make those flavor maps sprawl to hundreds of words to be as all-encompassing as possible. We could make regionally specific tools, combining global terms and local ones. Or we could totally reconceptualize the way that we talk about flavor. 

Whichever path we choose, rethinking the tasting language and standards that have defined the first several decades of the craft beer industry’s existence will be necessary to reach the drinkers and producers who may well shape its future. With craft beer still in its relative infancy in many countries, the potential is enormous—and that could change the very way that we evaluate beer.

A SYSTEM OF FLAVOR TERMINOLOGY

It’s easy to forget that the kinds of comparative tasting notes we use today haven’t been around long. We haven’t always described beer—or wine, or coffee, or other consumable products—as tasting like white bread, clove, tangerine, or rose. In fact, that primarily food- and flora-based lexicon is only around 50 years old.

In the 19th century, tasting notes were descriptive, but less specifically comparative. This is Professor Michael Donovan writing in 1830 in “The Cabinet Cyclopedia” (with thanks to beer historian Martyn Cornell for the following sources): “The qualities which constitute good porter in the present day are perfect transparency, a light brown colour, fulness on the palate, pure and moderate bitterness, with a mixture of sweetness, a certain sharpness or acerbity without sourness or burnt flavour, and a close creamy head, instantly closing in when blown aside.” 

Other 19th-century beer writing now reads as old-fashioned or hard to understand, like brewing manual author William Tizard’s description of some country-brewed Porter in 1846 as being: “shockingly bad, sometimes blinked [acetic], often tasting of empyreum [burnt matter], some black, some musty, some muddy, some barmy [yeasty] and some having the predominant taste of Spanish juice [licorice], which is not an uncommon ingredient and generally speaks for itself when taken upon a delicate stomach.”

It wasn’t until the 1970s that flavor language underwent a seismic shift, initially within the wine industry. As with beer, most older descriptions of wine did not include comparative assessments of its flavor, and instead personified the wine, describing it with ambiguous, often gendered, terms like elegant, muscular, soft, honest, refined, sensual, charming. Readers could get a sense of the drinking experience, or if the writer liked a given wine, but not much beyond that.

The move away from hedonic, personified language, and towards formal classification, was led by Ann C. Noble, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who had taught a class on sensory wine evaluation from 1974. Seeing how students often struggled to discern aromas in wine, “Ann combed through her cabinets for everyday odors like blackberry jam, vanilla extract, and dog fur, then placed them in glasses. She made her students blind sniff and memorize these ‘standards’ in what became—and remains—a mandatory crash course in putting consistent labels to around 150 odors,” writes Bianca Bosker in her book, “Cork Dork.” “The process of building this olfactory dictionary was nicknamed the ‘kindergarten of the nose,’ and Ann eventually formalized the vocabulary into a circular chart of six dozen descriptors she called the Wine Aroma Wheel.”

Simultaneous to that development in wine language—and likely influenced by it—Michael Jackson, arguably the man who developed modern beer writing, was also using relatable, accurate, and evocative language for beer, elevating its appeal and appreciation, and giving us new descriptions for beer. Jackson’s consumer-focused language coincided with industry moves toward developing a more concise and considered language for brewing, culminating in the original beer flavor wheel, released in 1978. 

The beer flavor wheel was created by the Danish brewing chemist Morten Meilgaard while working at Detroit’s Stroh Brewing Company. The European Brewery Convention, the American Society of Brewing Chemists, and the Master Brewers Association of the Americas, together with Meilgaard, developed the wheel with the intention of creating “a system of flavour terminology to meet the dual needs of (i) enabling brewers to communicate effectively about flavour and (ii) naming and defining each separately identifiable flavour note in beer,” Meilgaard explained in a paper published in the Journal of the Institute of Brewing. “The system comprises 44 terms to meet the first objective while 78 additional terms are suggested for the second.” 

Like Noble’s wine wheel, the beer wheel placed similar flavors together, and it excluded subjective and hedonic terms, but unlike its wine equivalent it was oriented towards the negative characteristics or faults found in a given beer, rather than its neutral attributes.

An updated wheel followed later with more comparative terms, but it still read like a list of Lager faults: There are just six terms which we’d associate with hop aroma (geraniol, perfumy, kettle hop, dry hop, hop oil, and piney, the latter probably not referring to the pine-like aromas of American hops), while “sulphury” gets 16 sub-descriptors. It’s not exactly something a drinker opening a can of IPA in 2022 can reference and correlate with modern descriptions like “hazier, fluffier and smoother… with mushy, overripe flavours of mango, rum punch, berry pavlova and freshly squeezed orange juice.”

It was the contradiction between that beer flavor wheel and the descriptive words I was reading and writing about beer which led me to obsess about flavor language, and to attempt to produce a new beer flavor wheel. I began that process in 2012, redrawing the wheel into an accessible consumer tool rather than a scientific reference for brewers. Then, in 2020, I developed a new wheel to correspond to the ever-changing beer lexicon, and in doing so also developed complementary wheels for hop, grain, and fermentation and maturation flavors. 

When creating them, I collected all the most common flavor words I came across, and scoured for lesser-used descriptors. I read as many tasting notes as I could, diving deep into flavor science and research, and worked with numerous experts in hops, grain, and fermentation. The list of possible flavors and scientific terms sprawled into the hundreds, and that was just from English-language literature. It was refined down to a little over 100 of the most common and relatable terms, comprising both desired flavors and off-flavors, plus some words to describe the drinking experience (like beer’s mouthfeel and finish).

But as the wheels were finally nearing completion, I was struck with a thought: Had I just produced something which reinforced Western ideas of flavor language? Was this actually a useful, global tool inclusive of a broad range of drinkers? Were those words common and relatable to a lot of people? And if not, how could they be made more relatable?

THIS BEER SMELLS LIKE GOOSEBERRIES

“When we standardize, we make things easier, sure, but for who?” says wine professional Miguel de Leon. “Who gets the benefit of understanding? Why deny the richness of our cultures, languages, and experiences as incorrect when it is just unfamiliar?” 

de Leon has been outspoken on moving wine language away from France. The history of winemaking “becomes repeated over generations and wears French,” he says, giving examples of technical jargon steeped in French influence, like pigeage, remuage and sur lie. “Obviously if you’re not French this is already a hurdle, but when English is also not your first language, this is an even higher barrier,” he says. Decentering the language by using easier-to-understand terms (think aging vs élévage) removes a bias of information from French vineyards, and allows “regional variation when we speak about flavor profiles and contexts.”

In a James Beard Award-winning piece in Punch, de Leon considers how wine language can be decolonized. “Language is a particular challenge, considering English is my third. Traditional wine tasting grids and wheels are biased to Eurocentric flavors, and crucial wine vocabularies can center on foods completely foreign to my Very Asian Palate, like the description of body akin to the fat content of milk products or the essence of a flavor component wrapped up in a fruit I have never even heard of. (Seriously, what in the actual fuck is a gooseberry?)”

For de Leon, “understanding that individual experiences and cultural references are different” is essential for making wine more accessible. “It’s not helpful to say a beverage reminds me of my grandfather’s liquor cabinet, though poetic, instead of saying a beverage evokes incense and scotch.” He adds that there’s a need to “remind ourselves who we’re writing to and for: How will my personal experience resonate with everyone else who is reading this, and how helpful is it for them to understand it?”

Garrett Oliver, brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery, echoes that sentiment. “Can you expect your audience to know what you’re talking about? Is there a reason to expect them to know what you’re talking about?” It’s a simple idea, but complex in reality, he says—and he would know. Oliver travels extensively for work, hosting tastings and dinners in a number of countries around the world; wherever he goes, he has to be sensitive to local flavor references when talking about beer.

“The descriptors you’re using with people in Japan can’t be the same descriptors you’re using in New York,” he says. “Before I’ll go and make a trip, I will look up the cultural makers, what are people’s favorite spices, what are their favorite fruits, what are the main flowers in the flower shop.” He’ll find the name of the mass-market white bread, and look at the other beverages commonly consumed locally. “Having that sensitivity simply allows you to get your ideas across more clearly, and when you’re speaking to an audience you have to think in terms of, are you bringing them into something, allowing them to see it, smell it, taste it, in their own minds, or are you unintentionally shutting them out?” 

“When we standardize, we make things easier, sure, but for who? Who gets the benefit of understanding? Why deny the richness of our cultures, languages, and experiences as incorrect when it is just unfamiliar?”

Oliver has developed a way of translating a given flavor to specific cultural touchstones. “If I’m talking about a burnt sugar character, in one context I will talk about the burned surface of a crème brûlée, in another context I’ll talk about the syrup on top of a flan,” he says, while in the U.K., “I might refer to the darker versions of Lyle’s syrup, but if you mention Lyle’s in the United States, no one’s ever heard of those.”

Ultimately, he wants to convey how you feel when you drink a beer, not just what fruits and baked goods might appear in the aroma. “The point of our beer language is to paint a picture in someone’s head that they can actually see,” he says. “That’s more evocative than trying to tell somebody that this beer smells like gooseberries when the average American has never heard of a gooseberry and has no idea what gooseberry tastes like.”

I HAVE TO SIMPLIFY THINGS

“We are quite new to craft beers and most people are still stuck at thinking of beers as just plain Lagers,” says Anudeep Mutyala, a beer educator and writer based in Bangalore. “We are at the very beginning of understanding the flavor language.”  

Each emerging beer market has its own reference points, its own words, and its own cultural palate to consider. And that’s why education on a local level—taking learnings from a wider beer industry, but being mindful to translate them for specific audiences—can be so powerful in the broader development of beer awareness. 

“If I want to communicate about a beer, I start to relate that to language which is familiar to an Indian audience,” Mutyala says. “A lime Gose is more like a lime soda,” he says, or sweeter Belgian beers are “like honey on your bread.” With Belgian Dubbel, “I relate that to mixed fruit jam.” 

A particular challenge in India, he says, is that there are over 120 languages spoken. As a large country, it has tremendous diversity in terms of climate, ingredients, and flavor regionality. Communicating in Hindi and English is Mutyala’s approach, while he’ll reference national brands with which people are broadly familiar. Instead of water crackers, he might say Krack Jack or Monaco biscuits. He uses Kissan Mixed Fruit Jam to describe general fruity flavors, while Brittania Atta, a popular bread brand, is his reference for wheat bread flavors. Bournvita, a barley and cocoa drink, is used to describe chocolate and sweet malt, and Kachar Mango Bite, a candy made with unripened green mango, is reminiscent of some hop characteristics. Say these terms in an American taproom and the references wouldn’t resonate, but by using these local flavors with Indian drinkers and servers, Mutyala is able to connect to his audience in a more salient, emotive way.

“I have to simplify things. I shouldn’t use fancy terms. I just tell them, be more expressive in your own way. If we can evoke a memory of their past, related to that beer, that will be the biggest thing we can do to get them to try the beer. We can say it’s toasty, bready, biscuity, nutty, but it doesn’t connect to them. It needs to spark a curiosity for them.”

(This isn’t an approach that’s specific to a market like India—even when I’m writing tasting notes, I self-translate depending on who I know the main readers will be. A Creamsicle in the U.S. becomes a Solero in the U.K.; graham crackers become digestive biscuits; circus peanuts are foam banana sweets; fruit cake is malt loaf.)

“I have to simplify things,” says Mutyala. “I shouldn’t use fancy terms. I just tell them, be more expressive in your own way. If we can evoke a memory of their past, related to that beer, that will be the biggest thing we can do to get them to try the beer. We can say it’s toasty, bready, biscuity, nutty, but it doesn’t connect to them. It needs to spark a curiosity for them.” 

Those approaches also resonate with Ukrainian beer writer and translator Lana Svitankova. While the palette of flavors that she pulls from varies significantly from Mutyala’s, the drive to relatability is the same.

“When you have a country which doesn’t have a beer tradition, people tend to use the local food descriptors because this is the thing they recognize instantly,” she says. She explains how kids in Ukraine grow up picking berries from bushes, so they know a redcurrant from a blackcurrant, and a gooseberry from a grape, but it’s not so natural to differentiate between exotic fruits. 

Ukraine has a strong tradition of making pickles and preserves, so these feature in flavor language: Pickled apple is a typical descriptor for sour beer, where “locals will understand immediately what flavor profile I am referring to, while foreigners will probably have no idea what I mean,” Svitankova says. There are Pastry Stouts which remind her of local chocolate bars and waffles, while oxidized hoppy beer reminds her and others of a local apricot jam.

Svitankova has translated several beer books into Ukrainian, including Randy Mosher’s “Tasting Beer.” Typically she directly translates from English into Ukrainian, but sometimes “I had to invent some words, because there were no existing analogues for them,” she says. One example was “pumpkin spice” for which she had to explain the concept of a pumpkin pie and list the spices; it’s not that Ukrainians don’t know the flavors, just that they don’t have the cultural reference point.

When talking about flavor, Svitankova favors broader terms rather than specific ones: She hopes that saying “stonefruit” allows her audience to find their own way rather than telling them they should pick up peach; if the drinker doesn’t taste peach, she’s worried they might think that she is making things up, or that they are not tasting it properly, she says. “And that’s not a good experience in either case. I would rather simplify the description, like red fruits or red berries, more general terms to avoid this situation where people don’t feel comfortable with their own experience.” 

SMELL WHAT YOU SMELL

Most flavors that we experience in beer are a combination of many different compounds, but certain smells—including many common off-flavors—result from single chemical compounds. We taste these and we learn to identify them in our own way, and yet there are established, precise ways of describing them: diacetyl is like butter, or buttered popcorn; acetaldehyde is like green apple; 4-vinyl guaiacol, or 4VG, is like clove. But even in these cases, it’s important to recognize the subjectivity inherent to our tasting experience, and the wide range of cultural reference points drinkers will pull from.

“I tell people, do not try to memorize [specific flavors],” says Apiwe Nxusani-Mawela, South Africa’s first female brewmaster, who is educating more South Africans, especially women, about beer. “Smell what you smell. It should trigger some memory, something that you know. Don’t try to memorize it based on textbook knowledge.” 

Nxusani-Mawela gives examples of off-flavors which she interprets differently to common references. For her, diacetyl is not associated with butter; instead, it reminds her of a candy she ate as a child. DMS, often compared to sweetcorn, smells of boiling mielie, or maize meal, or also of the local All Gold tomato sauce. She is effectively self-translating what she smells to the word that Western beer culture understands, but as the local craft beer industry matures, the translation may no longer be necessary. “Every culture has these things which can become their descriptors,” she says. 

One particular complication in South Africa is that there are 11 official languages, and “in each language, or each tribe, there are words used to describe beer,” she says. “Beer has been part of their communities for a very long time, so they have their own words which are commonly used.” But for craft beer, “We’re still building that culture and ways of describing our own beers.”

But “smell what you smell” is what guides her education, and she uses clove as an example. “If it reminds you of how your grandmother used to make you curry, or how they used to bake scones, for me that becomes our own descriptive words, but they still are aligned to the beer terminology.”

Appreciating the cultural smell spaces of beer is one key in reaching more drinkers on a local level in emerging beer markets. As for more developed markets, where there’s greater fluency in beer, there’s now the opportunity to speak in new and more evocative ways.

THAT’S HOW YOU BRING IN MORE DRINKERS

Michelle Tham, head of beer education at Labatt Breweries of Canada, is placed between the consumer, the bartender, the brewer, and the marketing department. Her job is to ensure that any beer description can make sense to anyone, which means taking a systematic approach to evaluating a beer, using a framework to help drill down to a specific tasting profile. 

Let’s use IPA as an example. “Somebody could smell that IPA and say, ‘That smells fruity,’ and that’s where we can drill down a little bit,” she says. “So is it citrus, is it plant-like in the grassy family, is it peppery, is it floral?” We decide it’s fruity and it’s citrus. “Then do we drill down to it being grapefruit, lemon, lime, orange?” It’s grapefruit. “Well is it fresh grapefruit, is it candied grapefruit, is it grapefruit peel, is it grapefruit oil?” she says. “When you get that specific, you can start romancing that language a little bit, so, ‘From the essential oils of a grapefruit twist’ is now a term that we can use that sounds engaging and evocative to a consumer.”

“You can have beers that smell like a freshly baked lemon loaf, you can have crusty caramelized edges of a bread pudding in your Doppelbocks and you can have the nostalgic sidewalk lemonade stand combined with grandmother’s preserve in a Bud Light Strawberry Lemonade. If we can continue to use that language to show the breadth of choice that exists in beer right now, I think that’s how you bring in more drinkers to the category.”

But, she says, “As much as you can paint a really great picture, and write a really great tasting note,” for the everyday beer drinker that walks into the store, “their descriptions of beer, if they were to describe it, would sound very different.” 

This is where flavor language needs to meet the drinker where they already are. “The most popular word used to describe a beer that is a positive attribute is the term ‘smooth,’” says Tham. But what does that mean? To the brewer it is likely a descriptor of mouthfeel and texture, whereas to the drinker it’s a word to describe a flavor profile lacking imbalances. “Consumers got to ‘smooth’ and ‘refreshing’ because of the beer industry. They didn’t pull them out of what we learned in grade school. We didn’t learn about descriptors in school, we learned them from advertising,” she says. “The industry can play a role in now guiding the consumer to be more detailed in the way they talk about beer on their own.”

For Tham, continuing to build a culture of describing beer with specific and evocative flavor language can really “show the range of what exists in beer,” she says. Going ultra-specific—rather than trying to create generalized tasting descriptions that speak to as many people as possible—can be a way to encourage genuine connection. “You can have beers that smell like a freshly baked lemon loaf, you can have crusty caramelized edges of a bread pudding in your Doppelbocks and you can have the nostalgic sidewalk lemonade stand combined with grandmother’s preserve in a Bud Light Strawberry Lemonade,” she says. “If we can continue to use that language to show the breadth of choice that exists in beer right now, I think that’s how you bring in more drinkers to the category.”

Tham’s descriptions have a familiarity to them, a nostalgia or approachability, and show the power of language to evoke feeling—whether positive or negative. Flavor is much more than just a composite of various volatile aroma compounds and the five tastes of sweet, bitter, sour, salty, and umami. It is deeply personal, vested with emotion, wonderfully mutable.

But this raises an interesting philosophical question: Who, then, should decide how a beer is formally described? That authority has more weighing on it than is immediately apparent.

Let’s say a brewer has made an IPA and their tasting notes say “dank, pine sap and resinous,” but marketing doesn’t think those words sound so good, so instead they describe the beer as tasting like “grapefruit, peach and mango.” The astute beer drinker might question the flavor disparity, but the average drinker may question their own ability to taste beer instead, and be discouraged by that. 

The industry has long shaped beer’s language and will continue to do so, but for it to succeed, it has to be both evocative, honest, and cognizant of these small but key ways that taste expectations are communicated and shaped.

TERMINOLOGY IS NEVER STATIC

“As we develop our own language, rather than falling back on the same descriptors over and over again—it’s fruity, it’s this, it’s that—you reach for things that are familiar to everyday people,” says Garrett Oliver. “And these things change over time.” 

Flavor language changes alongside the beers that we drink. As trends cycle in and out, so do our descriptions of what we drink. “Crispy” is overused for most Lagers; “juicy” is common for Hazy IPAs; and today’s hops might smell like guava, papaya, and jackfruit, fruits that many Westerners likely hadn’t tasted a decade ago (and maybe still haven’t tasted today). The language we use to communicate about beer is as fluid as beer itself, and evolves with every new drinker who brings their own flavor experiences, their own words, to the industry. 

As local beer communities continue to grow and change—and as regional styles are created that go a step beyond standard-issue, American-inspired beers—so words can be used to create new community flavors.

“If I don’t smell it in the sensory wheel, can I talk about this?” That’s a question Doug Merlo has been asked during his beer classes. During one tasting for a hoppy Lager, students tasked with describing the beer named different fruits: orange, mango, pineapple. “Five minutes after, a student asked to talk. ‘Professor, now in the aftertaste I feel something like goiaba,’” a guava typical to Brazil. “This is a very good thing,” Merlo says, and he encourages his students to smell what they smell, and to name those experiences. 

Merlo also explains how brewers are “waking up to these things, to our terroir, to exotic woods, exotic spices, or exotic fruits,” and using more local terms. There’s even a micro-maltster in Blumenau, Brazil producing a malt with a tasting note of paçoca. “It’s impossible to describe in English and other languages. It’s something from Brazil,” he says of the roasted and ground sweet-and-savory peanut snack. Merlo also sent more examples via email of what he calls “territorial smells,” including doce de leite, cumaru, rapadura, melado, leite condensado, and pé de moleque. Merlo and I might both drink the same beer, but we’ll taste it in our own ways, based on our own experiences. 

The uniqueness of flavor appreciation means being considerate of all drinkers, guiding but not pushing, and always allowing for individual interpretations. Wheels and maps take you to a certain point—citrus, chocolate, spice, or maybe lemon, cacao nibs, and white pepper—but the specificity of the experience, and the personal enjoyment of it, can only be reached by the individual, who will always be informed by their own cultural context. 

In 1979, when Meillgard’s beer flavor wheel was published, his corresponding report in the Journal of the Institute of Brewing had this as its third paragraph: “Terminology is never static, nor should it be. It reflects both the changes in common usage and the results of research as they become available.” It urges that the wheel is used, critiqued, reported on, and “then, in say five years time, a new working group must be given the task of bringing the terminology up to date.”

It’s taken longer than five years, but the idea remains: The wheels remain in motion, and as more people come to beer, so the language we use can get broader but also more inclusive, more thoughtful of who might drink that beer, and the words which they might naturally use to describe it.

Words by Mark Dredge
Illustrations by David Alvarado