Behind the Brew is a column where Molson Coors employees explain in their own words what’s new in their department and how it’s driving the company forward. Becky Doege is the manager of Molson Coors’ Sensory Services in Milwaukee. She’s also a three-time Bill Coors Taster of the Year award winner.
My team, the Molson Coors Sensory Services department, is responsible for taste testing the quality of all our products. And when people hear that’s what I do for a living, they usually say the exact same thing: “What a great job. You get paid to taste test beer!”
And while we do, in fact, taste beer for a living, it’s just one small part of our duties. Most of my day is actually spent analyzing data to ensure that our beers have the quality and consistent taste we know people are looking for, regardless of which of our breweries it was brewed in.
This requires constant attention, though, because let me tell you…beer is temperamental.
Malt from different suppliers can have different taste profiles. Flavors can be altered by slight temperature fluctuations at the brewery or by new packaging. And while those things may seem small or subtle, it all affects the quality and consistency of the beer we put out for everyone to enjoy.
And that is why we exist.
Every brewery has its own sensory program that constantly monitors the beverages it produces. And then my team, here in Milwaukee, analyzes beer from each brewery to make sure that a Miller Lite you drink in Georgia tastes the same as one you enjoy in Ohio.
Could we lean on a machine or technology to do this for us? Yes, and we do. But nothing replaces the human touch when it comes to quality. An instrument can tell you what compounds are in the beer, but only a person can tell you how they play together.
Scoring every sip
Our team gets to make a big impact. We also enlist dozens of volunteers who work within the company to help. Yep, if you’re part of the Molson Coors team, you can also sign up to taste beer as part of your day job!
While this is obviously fun, it’s much more than telling us whether a beer is good or not. Volunteers have to attend a number of training programs. By the end they can identify 36 different beer attributes, from bitterness, sweetness and body to defects like stale, papery notes or sulfur compounds.
Though we call them tastings, most of the time is spent smelling. There are only five basic tastes, but with that comes thousands of aroma compounds – when you “taste” malty notes in a beer, that’s mainly coming from the smell.
That’s why we spend so much effort keeping everything clean and odor free, from the glasses to our space. In fact, we have a special ventilation system to ensure that the air in our tasting rooms is free of unwanted odors.
Once testers score the samples, this information is plugged into our system, where we analyze whether those numbers hit the targets we have for each specific brand. That gets passed to the brands, so the brewers know what’s working and what changes need to be made.
And as Molson Coors is evolving as a beverage business, so are we, which means we’re testing more than just beer these days. As new products are introduced, we’re developing new lexicons to evaluate them and creating new training programs to broaden our capabilities. Beer is still at the root of what we do, but it’s so exciting to introduce new aspects of our business and integrate it into what we do every day.
How do we know whether we can trust the tasters? Because we score them, too! We can see any scores that are wildly off. Tasters need to hit a certain percentage of correct answers on a yearly basis to make sure that they're qualified to continue testing.
Celebrating Together
Now it might sound like we take tasting beer really seriously around here, but that’s because we do! We invest in our volunteers, we get competitive and we take our jobs really seriously.
Because at the end of the day, we get to put a big mark on the beer you enjoy.
To honor the best tasters, we created the Bill Coors Taster of the Year Award. Founded in 2016 when Bill was 100 years old, the award honors his lifelong commitment to quality beer. To be as fair as possible, taster performance is measured by an external Taster Validation Scheme. Everyone who scores above 85% is eligible to compete for a chance to win a yearly “Taste Off.” The winner from the pool wins the award.
I’m so proud to have won the award three times. For whatever reason, I’m very sensitive to aromas!
It gives me a lot of pleasure to know that our department plays a part in making sure that every sip is consistently high-quality, helping deliver on one of our key company promises of helping people celebrate together.