This course is unique – the world’s most comprehensive course for training true experts in the flavors of hops. Immerse yourself in the universe of hops and follow a structured syllabus covering the language and secrets of experiencing hops through taste and other senses.
The BarthHaas HOP FLAVORIST COURSE is split into five consecutive levels. Starting with the basics of using your senses to assess hops and culminating with the creation of your own personal Taster Profile, you will train your flavor skills one step at a time. The course concludes with an assessment and the official award ceremony.
The task of training your senses starts with an extended warm-up for your sense receptors and your brain. The task of describing in words what your senses are telling your brain is not an easy one. Fruits, herbs and other natural aromas give us the building blocks for learning how to work with a range of well-known hop varieties.
Your sense memory will be put to a flavor test by a range of natural substances and hop varieties. The aim is to strengthen the connections between your appreciation of aroma and the language center of your brain to help you describe flavors more accurately.
Anyone who wants to feel at home in the hop garden has to understand the many factors that affect the aroma of green gold. This targeted training for your sensors allows to to distinguish even the most similar hop varieties according to various categories.
The fourth stage of the Hop Flavorist Course is literally a who's who of hops. We take sense training a step further to focus on specific categories, learning how to identify the subtle differences among more than 250 unique varieties of hop available around the world.
Just like an athlete training specific muscle groups for competition, the hop expert must regularly train their sense receptors and brain. Alongside creativity and experience, repetition and deeper and deeper learning are the hallmarks of great tasters. This is the purpose of the fifth and final level of the course.