Found a Julian-style date code on your beer? Use this free Beer Julian Date Decoder to translate day-of-year codes into calendar dates and figure out how old your beer is.

Buying beer for sensory practice takes a little more strategy than grabbing the right style off the shelf. Learn how to check beer freshness, where to find packaging dates, how to decipher common date codes, and how old is too old for sensory evaluation.

How many sensory descriptors can you name in three minutes? This quick exercise uses retrieval practice to build a more accessible flavor vocabulary.

One of the questions I get asked most often about palate training with flavor standards is how to distinguish acetic acid from lactic acid. This exercise demonstrates several methods and includes a DIY option.

How accurately can you put bitterness in order? Learn how intensity ranking works, then put your palate to the test with five blind beer samples.

We perceive bitterness chemically through our sense of taste. We perceive astringency physically through our trigeminal sense. While understanding that two different systems are working to detect bitterness and astringency is helpful in theory, the reality is that these sensations are still happening in one small area at the same time - our palates, namely our tongues.

It’s kind of like saying a snake is venomous, not poisonous. Nice to know, but that doesn’t really help you when you’re staring at a snake that looks like it wants to hurt you in one way or another.

Explaining how bitterness works as a taste sense, how it appears in beer, and how we perceive it is one of my favorite sensory exercises to do. People come away with new knowledge not only about bitterness, but also about their palates and how they perceive bitterness. This is a super easy exercise to set up that also scales fabulously for large groups, so it is low-effort, high-reward for you as the organizer and for the participants.

The Vague to Vivid exercise is a fun and easy sensory exercise for a variety of group sizes and skill levels.

Knowing how much beer to buy and how many cups you’ll need for a beer sensory exercise can be overwhelming. Here you will find calculators for beer volume, cups needed, and more. Great for group beer sensory and beer palate training at home!

Sensory advice for stuffy noses is probably not something a lot of us have thought about. That is, until we have a tasting exam, judging session, or other sensory exercise where we need our noses in tip-top shape. Whether from dryness or sickness, having a stuffy nose and/or clogged sinuses obviously affects your physical and mental ability to evaluate beer. In this post, I’ll talk about steps you can take to prevent or mitigate nasal stuffiness, as well as a couple of sinus-clearing exercises to try when our best efforts fail.

Believe me when I tell you that doing the preliminary work of making, printing, and affixing labels to cups and other things is the difference between a well-organized beer sensory session and a confusing mess.

Everyone loves to rub hops. Hop rubs are quick, easy, and messy. Experience beer’s ingredients in as many different forms as possible.

The hop tea method is useful to assess the potential dry-hop aroma of hops. For those studying for beer exams with a tasting component, such as Cicerone, BJCP, or WSET, hop teas are a great way to learn more about hop aromas and distinguish among hop varieties.

The hop grind method is a simple, quick, and repeatable sensory exercise for evaluating hop aroma.