Mandy Naglich has written a book that explores how our senses interact with food and beverage, and how understanding our senses can help us better enjoy our favorite indulgences. How to Taste: A Guide to Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life (Citadel) combines science and whimsy to teach us more about our sensory world and bring our favorite flavors to life. Listen in as we talk with Mandy Naglich about her book How to Taste.

Today we talk with Dr. J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham, the principle behind Crafted for All, a consultancy that helps craft beverage companies and organizations be more inclusive, equitable, and just, about descriptive tasting language for beer, how culturally informed those vocabularies can be, and how the tasting experience can be used to invite newcomers into craft beer.

In this episode Advanced Cicerone David Nilsen talks with Lauren Gay, a Certified Sommelier and the wine director and general manager at Sueño and Tender Mercy in Dayton, Ohio. Lauren is passionate about hospitality and just really great wine, and you can hear her enthusiasm as she discusses her journey as a Somm, what she loves about the tasting experience, and how she extends that experience to her guests. Along the way, David & Lauren taste two excellent beers and three bean to bar chocolates to get a unique perspective on the flavors of each from seasoned wine expert.

In this episode we hang out with artist Katie Clark Gabbard as she uses her paints, brushes, and canvases to interpret and express what her senses of taste and smell experience when presented with beers and chocolates without knowing anything about them.

In this quick interview with beer educator and Advanced Cicerone Natalya Watson, I talked with Nat about how we develop a better tasting vocabulary and ability to describe beer, and she highlighted the importance of practice and curiosity.

Need the perfect theme for your at-home beer tasting party with friends? There are dozens and dozens of beer styles out there, so let a beer expert make some suggestions for how to weed through the confusion and pick the perfect theme for your beer tasting.

Tasting craft beer or bean to bar chocolate can be a beautiful and profound experience. We engage all of our senses when we taste craft beer and bean to bar chocolate, an experience that engages our memories, emotions, and imaginations as well. In this episode we discuss the process of tasting craft beer and craft chocolate and explore how this connects us to ourselves, the world around us, and the people we meet.

As craft beer works to be more inclusive, the language we use to describe beer needs to be examined. In this episode Dr. J Nikol Jackson-Beckham talks about where cultural biases are found in beer language and how we can learn to use descriptive sensory language to welcome newcomers and learn from others.

Beer & chocolate both have their own languages and modes of expression, and each can learn from the other.

Our flavor vocabularies for beer & chocolate are affected by so many things we rarely think about.