Neon Demon: Exploring Taste Through Barrel-Aged Imperial Stout

This week we’re launching Neon Demon; a beer through which we seek to highlight the complexities of taste sensation. The antiquated olfactory paradigm teaches that distinct regions of your tongue respond to the main taste categories of sweet, sour, bitter, salt and savoury. And while taste can be partitioned into those broad categories, our experience of flavour is far more complex.

One of my favourite sensory experiments to do at home is the old jelly bean taste test. Pinch yer snozer and chew a bean. All you get is a glucose like sweetness and texture. Then open your nose and breathe in. You’ll be flooded with all the fruity flavours of the bean, unless you selected a licorice bean, in which case I hope your nose falls off. Pretty succinct showcase of the complexities of flavour experience and the immutable marriage of olfaction and taste.

When launching an adjunct Impy Stout your options on adding flavour are to balance or enhance. So things like sweetness balances sour, just as salt balances bitterness. Or you can enhance, like salt enhances sweetness, sourness can sometimes enhance bitterness.

We wanted to approach this one from a unique angle. Could we combine all the taste sensations, to give the user an evolving experience of sensory excitement. Something that changes on each sip so you can see new flavours throughout the entire can.

So we have muscovado for sweetness, a chloride dominant water profile for the saltiness, tangerine and bergamot peel for sourness, cinnamon for bitterness and the coconut and oak texture from the barrel as the savoury element.

I don’t say this often… but I’m pretty ok with this beer. I can see each taste and it certainly evolves with temperature and time. It’s a nice experiment.

Luke said I have to say it's “in tins and on tap on Friday” but tbh I could give a crap. I'll just drink it myself.