As beverage experts, we’re dedicated to crafting a complete sensory experience in our development process. But if we had to pick one sense to boast about, it would undoubtedly be taste. Everyone encounters flavor in various forms, whether it’s that refreshing soda straight from the fridge or an aged spirit you save for those special moments. But how often in life do we intentionally engage in a structured tasting to assess a beverage’s essence? For our clients, it’s a regular occurrence, as they work with our experts for months to perfect their formula and capture its essence. Yet, for others, it might happen during a wine-tasting escapade, a mixologist’s quest for the next cocktail sensation, or simply someone experimenting in their own kitchen.

While we don’t anticipate you becoming a super taster overnight, adhering to best practices during a tasting session is pivotal to either creating or identifying that one-of-a-kind refreshment. It’s a nuanced endeavor, far beyond a mere thumbs-up or thumbs-down judgment of a drink. Rest assured, the art of tasting is our bread and butter, and part of our mission to Change What the World is Drinking is to share our insights with you!

Tasting – Why Do We Do It?

Believe it or not, it’s not enough for a drink to merely taste good; ideally you want it to have its own unique character. This is crucial in our process, as our clients ask us to craft nearly an entire personality for their product. For example, is this drink more for daytime sipping or the life of the nighttime party? Does it cozy up to a specific season, or does it play nice year-round?

Katie Clark, Director of Research and Development, thinks that the sip of a drink is much like a story, saying, “The flavor that starts in your mouth isn’t the same one that leaves it”. She continues, “I think of a cocktail that greets with aromatic citrus and herbals, introducing its mild sweetness, then is followed by the warmth of the base spirit. When a drink successfully delivers on all these fronts and concludes with an intriguing finish, I find myself ordering a second round every time,”.

It’s normal to never have thought so deeply about a cocktail from your local bar or a refreshment to wash down your meal. But, during formal tasting sessions, these attributes act as your roadmap that will ultimately lead to your final analyses and critiques.

Preparing Your Tasting Session

Understanding the significance of mindful tasting is just the beginning. If you’re curating your own tasting expedition, here’s some groundwork to cover and thoughts to sip on:

• Stay Healthy: Avoid tasting while you’re under the weather. When sinuses tend to clog up, it impairs our ability to taste and smell. So, while we always wish you the best of health, you’ll achieve the finest results when you’re feeling your best.
• Odor-Free Environment: It’s not ideal to sample your lemon-flavored sparkling water in a room where someone is busy cooking up burgers. Your nose and taste buds are like two peas in a pod, so strive to maintain a neutral tasting space.
• Morning Alertness: Your senses are at their peak in the morning. We recommend conducting your full-fledged taste tests within the hours of breakfast and lunch.
• Mind Breakfast Choices: During breakfast, it’s a good idea to steer clear of strong flavors like coffee, garlic, and spicy foods. These flavors tend to linger, even after a round of mouthwash, and can greatly alter your palate.
• Don’t go at it alone: Not only is it more fun to have group tasting sessions, but it’ll provide more insight – we recommend a group of no more than 3-4 tasters.

These guidelines might seem nit-picky, but they are tried-and-true techniques employed by beverage experts and professional tasters that will end up yielding incredible results!

Tasting Evaluation

Now that you’ve grasped what’s involved in the mindful tasting journey, prepared your tasting rounds, and cleansed your palate, it’s time to get to the part you’ve been parched for! Although the skill of picking up subtle flavor notes in any beverage or dish is a skill that takes years to refine, we’re here to provide you with the building blocks of a seasoned expert’s strategy!

We suggest taking a methodical, but simple, approach, focusing on your senses:

• Seeing: It goes without saying to make sure to use a clear cup with your pours for this evaluation to be effective. Observe the color hues and opacity. Is it clear, cloudy, transparent, or completely opaque?
• Smelling: Dive into the aroma. How potent or subtle is the scent? Does it carry a sweet or savory fragrance? The aroma can often provide valuable insights into the drink’s character.
• Tasting: This is where the canvas opens. Explore a range of flavors, including sweetness, tartness, saltiness, bitterness, and earthiness. Your taste buds are your guides here, so let them lead you through the intricate world of flavors. Depending on your drink, your palate should pick up on intensity of alcohol content or amount of carbonation. To top it off, evaluate that aftertaste, because sometimes it can make or break your drink.
• Feeling: Does it have a watery texture, or is it thick and viscous? Does it leave a lingering coating in your mouth? Is it smooth or oily, or does it present any challenges when swallowing?

Our very own Key Projects Manager, Cory Pierce, suggests, “One should taste their samples in three distinct ways: chilled, over ice, and at room temperature”, and for reference, “Ice can dilute the flavors, rendering the drink more subdued, while a chilled beverage tends to present a somewhat less pronounced sweetness,”. This thoughtful approach allows aspiring drink developers to fine-tune their creations, ensuring they shine under various serving conditions, ultimately delivering a delightful experience to customers.

Also, palate cleansers are essential! Taking a sip of room temperature water in between sips ensures your senses remain neutral as you transition between drinks. The aim is to prevent any confusion between one sample and another, especially if variations are subtle. Speaking of convoluting flavors, refrain from sharing your opinion in group settings until after the session concludes. While a fellow taster may perceive nutmeg when you detect cinnamon, sharing this might influence your real-time perception.

Finally, depending on your end goal for the tasting, it might be necessary for you to record your thoughts. We always advise our clients to jot down as many notes as possible during their sampling, even if observations don’t make perfect sense. Your tastebuds are unique to you, much like a fingerprint, so take your time and trust your instinct. There are no wrong answers! This experience can be relaxing and enjoyable, just as much as it is informational and productive.

Cheers – You’ve Got This!

In sensory practices, there’s no velvet rope that’s exclusive to experts in the beverage or culinary industry. It’s open to all, regardless of your background. As it is Flavorman’s mission to Change What the World Is Drinking, we are committed to nurturing the palates of both newcomers and novices alike. If you’re just starting on this flavorful path, we hope our words have ignited your curiosity and, perhaps, kindled a desire to explore your tasting abilities. For our seasoned pros, our aspiration is to have breathed new life into your creative spirit, offering a fresh lens through which to view future tastings.

Whether you’re taking your first sip or thousandth, remember to trust the process and savor every moment (and flavor), because that’s when the real magic unfolds!

Have an idea for a new beverage? Flavorman can help you bring it to life! Call us at (502)273-5214 or contact our team through this webform.

Expertise, experience, and excellence mixed with character, kindness, and a commitment to quality makes for one hell of a company culture cocktail. While always focused on our mission to change what the world is drinking, we believe establishing a professional environment that values our people as much as our profits and prioritizes true work-life balance ultimately leads to the type of serious and significant engagement that results in lasting, sustainable success. Operating with positive intent, communicating with respect and honesty, demanding quality throughout the process, embracing change as we celebrate unprecedented growth, and remaining ethical, principled, and accountable, this is The Flavorman Way.

Far too often professional environments and corporate cultures center around fear and politics, selfishness and greed. Hey, it’s a dog-eat-dog world, right? Survival of the fittest where the only thing that matters is the bottom line. Profits over people, numbers over names, policies over common sense, legal liability over ethical responsibility, exorbitant executive bonuses over reasonable working wages. The relentless pressure to outperform year-over-year and meet arbitrary and unreasonable goals and expectations can and will warp your mind, challenge your character, suffocate your creativity, and exhaust your spirit. Every day is a battle to keep perspective, manage your boss, and prioritize yourself. It’s no way to work and certainly no way to live. Nonetheless, it’s an undeniable reality for far too much of the American workforce. At one time or another, we’ve all gotten a taste of that dangerous toxicity, which is why when you find a supportive, encouraging, rewarding, and empowering culture like the one here at Flavorman, you can’t help but celebrate and appreciate it.

And at our core is The Flavorman Way, a roadmap of guiding principles that define and shape how we communicate, behave, and interact internally so that we can be at our best externally. The foundation of Flavorman is rooted in our expertise, character, and commitment to quality and with the company’s explosive growth over the last three years, it became clear that we needed to formally identify our core values and fundamentals if we wanted to protect the sacred culture that’s inspired the genius and ingenuity of our people and process for the past 31 years.

Including when COVID hit in 2020. While most of the world was shutting their doors and struggling to stay in business, we quickly transitioned to producing hand sanitizer for the state and actually ended up hiring people when the panic of the pandemic was at its height. And we haven’t stopped. Over the past three years, we’ve more than doubled our workforce (from 38 employees to 66) while continuing to set new revenue records seemingly every month. Add in the completion of our transformative new $8.5M, 27K-square-foot Scott Reed Building and our move later this year to an additional 13K-square-foot building that will more than triple the working space for our world-class lab and flavor teams, and it doesn’t take a beverage scientist to figure out business is booming. Make no mistake about it, the future of Flavorman is now. And as we continue to navigate our way through this period of rapid growth and significant change, we’ll make sure we don’t go astray by staying true to The Flavorman Way.

1) Assume Positive Intent

“See the best in people and watch how they fight to prove you right.” – Skip Prichard

The road to success is often filled with potholes, wrong turns, and torrential downpours. But the companies that weather the storms and make it through do it because of their people and leadership. And when both are aligned, great things can happen. Look, we all make mistakes. Even the best of us. But when companies show grace and understanding instead of judgement and disdain, they earn the kind of meaningful trust and authentic buy-in that ultimately leads to long-term success. When smart, motivated, and well-intentioned professionals are given the benefit of the doubt and a chance to right their wrongs, a fierce loyalty and deep appreciation are developed for an environment that supports us at our worst and celebrates us at our best. Sure, there will be those who take a foot when given an inch, but the rest of us will take that inch and give it back in spades because that’s what you do when you’re a good teammate on a great team. You play inspired because you’re surrounded and supported by inspired people. Positive intent > toxic politics; trust > micro-management; grace > judgement; empowerment > fear.

2) Be Accountable & Engage In Blameless Solutions

“Wisdom stems from personal accountability. We all make mistakes; own them…learn from them. Don’t throw away the lesson by blaming others.” – Steve Maraboli

All five principles of The Flavorman Way intersect and overlap in many ways, particularly the first three, as true accountability and honest, respectful communication can really only take place when the parties involved trust everyone is operating with positive intentions. When it’s about the whole instead of the parts, the team instead of the individual, then people can truly come together, move forward as one, and address issues and solve problems effectively because of a shared trust and respect. The Blame Game is a devastating and destructive force, and yet, it’s played at the highest stakes routinely in far too many professional environments – where ego, politics, and greed create a toxicity that drains the spirit and poisons company cultures.

3) Communicate With Maturity, Respect, & Honesty

“Listen with curiosity. Speak with honesty. Act with integrity. The greatest problem with communication is we don’t listen to understand. We listen to reply.” – Roy T. Bennett

When we think about interpersonal communication, we think about the importance of speaking and writing with clarity, purpose, and sincerity so we give ourselves the best chance to get our point across. However, no matter how carefully crafted the message is or how authentically it’s delivered, it doesn’t matter if nobody is listening. That’s why it’s so critically important that communication travels down a two-way road, where interactions take place with open minds, empathetic hearts, and positive intentions. That’s when you establish the kind of direct and honest communication that gets things done and moves companies forward.

4) Demand Quality & Ethics

“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” – Will A. Foster

Quality is at the core of everything we do here at Flavorman and Moonshine University because of the expertise, talent, passion, and commitment of our people. No detail is too small and no project is too big. Our lab teams have created more than 80,000 original beverage formulations over the last three decades. It’s an astonishing and impressive amount of work. And with the recent growth of the company and exciting developments happening, our R&D and flavor teams are as inspired as they’ve ever been to change what the world is drinking by continuing to capture the imagination of our clients so they can deliver innovative new products to an ever-evolving marketplace. In order to accomplish that mission, we’ll continue to depend on the talent and experience of our people and the power of our collaborative and thorough process, which begins and ends with quality, a defining trait of our business since day one. It’s why Jones Soda decided to work with us way back in 1994 after a number of their flavored sodas were failing in quality and needed to be reformulated. And in a matter of weeks, we not only made sure their sodas were shelf-life dependable, we turned them into their five highest-selling flavors.

5) Embrace & Celebrate Change As Necessary For Growth

“Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.” – William Pollard

When our founder, Dave Dafoe, started Flavorman (legally known as Pro-Liquitech) more than 30 years ago in 1992, he was the only employee. Eighteen years later, in 2010, Flavorman still had just 12 team members. Today, as we previously mentioned, we have 66, more than half of which have been hired post-COVID. And it hasn’t been just our team that’s exploded in growth, our physical footprint has expanded as well. With the purchase of the building that will serve as the new home for our R&D and flavor teams and the completion of our game-changing production building, Flavorman’s state-of-the-art Beverage Campus in downtown Louisville, KY now populates an entire city block.

Things have been moving fast, but our team has embraced the changes and inevitable challenges just as we always have throughout our history, especially when times have been toughest. Whether it was almost losing Dave in 2004 when he was hospitalized for over a month or being knocked to our knees by an historic flood in 2009, we’ve been at our best when our best has been needed. For better or worse, in sickness and health, come hell or high water, this company will continue to rise to the challenge because of our selfless leadership, quality of our people, and commitment to each other.

In an interview with Forbes in 2015, Dave talked about his deep appreciation for the people who have shed blood, sweat, and tears right alongside him all these years. With a multimillion offer already on the table, Dave was asked why he hadn’t sold the company.

“I’m not just going to sell and whisk my way off to the Caribbean and leave people here who have helped me build this business. We have very little turnover. Many of our employees started right out of college. I’m only interested in a purchaser who wants to come in and build the business.”

That level of loyalty is why Chief Business Officer Jon Wood is still here after 27 years, Inventory Specialist Scott Reed is going 19 years strong, Special Projects Manager Cory Pierce has been here for 16 years, COO Scott Weddle is on year 13, and Chief Technical Officer Kristen Wemer has been with the company for over a decade. And that’s just to name a few.

Because the more things change, the more they stay the same. We’ve certainly come a long way since Dave bravely left the comfortable confines of corporate America at Brown-Forman and started Pro-Liquitech with nothing but his perfect palate and cash advances from a handful of credit cards, coupled with an uncanny ability to develop unique and original beverages. However, at our core, we’re the same company we’ve always been. Creative, dynamic, intelligent, passionate, driven, determined, and dedicated.

And it starts at the top with a group of steady, unselfish leaders who empower our people by cultivating a culture that shows us grace when we fall short of expectations, looks for solutions without assigning blame, communicates honestly and respectfully, demands quality in everything we do, and celebrates change and growth. The kind of culture that honors an employee’s 19 years of loyalty and hard work by naming its new $8.5M building after him; the kind of culture led by a founder and CEO who didn’t speak or take a shovel at the groundbreaking for the production building because he wanted our new COO to have that moment and become the public face of our company; the kind of culture that’s never lost its way through the years because we’ve always operated with the same commitment to quality and character that we had when we first opened up shop way back in 1992, when The Dream Team was dominating the Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Nirvana’s Nevermind was at the top of the charts, and Dave had a lot more black hair.

“As Flavorman enjoyed its 30th year in business and completion of our new production building, I reminded myself that I did not build Flavorman by myself. It was natural to name this building for a long-time co-worker who contributed in many ways to our growth. Companies often talk about creating meaningful company culture, and naming the Scott Reed Building is one way we continue to put words into action.” – Dave Dafoe, Founder & CEO

This is The Flavorman Way.

Have an idea for a new beverage? Flavorman can help you bring it to life! Call us at (502)273-5214 or contact our team through this webform.

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