What we did one night - A Staff Training Exercise

When I started working in hospitality, one of the great training days you always looked forward to was wine tasting, especially in Hospitality College as a 20 year old from the outer suburbs whose taste for alcohol had mainly consisted of bogan Aussie beer and cask wine. Yay! Wine! In class!

The poor lecturer, trying to teach us all about the different varieties, regions, styles and of course taste and aroma. Anyone who has done this will probably remember their first time too. Lecturer ‘now, what does the wine taste like?’ Student ‘ Grapes!’ (fall down laughing)

The palate over time adjusts and learns to identify with different flavours and of course in many ways the same is with coffee. But when you start off, it is also very hard to pick out all the amazing flavour profiles that a well made coffee does produce. Lecturer ‘what does this coffee taste like?’ Student ‘Coffee!’ (fall down laughing)

But when you start to get it, when that memory or taste sensation picks something out and hits you and you are like ‘wow, that really tastes like strawberries!’. it’s amazing.

So the other night, two of our baristas Shaun and Blazej conducted a training session to help develop our taste palates and it was one of the best training sessions we have had. It reminded me of the days when our wine lecturer brought in straw and grass and oak and tobacco to help us recognise these qualities in what we were drinking.

They made up 12 different solutions with water, which all had a different taste profile, lemons, apples, bananas, hazelnuts, cherries, chocolate etc etc. We then had a form to fill in and had to taste each solution and try to pick what the flavour was from 1 to 12, moving down the line, slurping from our spoons. Not only that, but they put food colour dye into some of the solutions, so that we might 

be tasting and thinking blue water, but it tasted of bananas. Tricky. And we all ended up with blue tinged teeth.

Some of us got up to 7 out of 12, others only got three or four, but when we found out the answers and then tasted them again, that memory recognition kicked in and you knew that’s what it was.

When we finished, we also did a blind tasting of four different hot chocolates and then we did six different beers. Really very interesting taste profiling the delerium tremens from Belgium against an English lager.

I do not believe it is that totally important in the grand scheme of things to be able to pick out for example the persimmon flavour in an espresso, what is important is that it just tastes really amazing, was served efficiently and professionally and that you enjoyed the overall experience. But when you do get that flavour recognition, or your staff do, and their faces light up with enthusiasm, that is a wonderful thing indeed.

Peter Dore-Smith
Director
Kaffeine Ltd
66 Great Titchfield st.
15 Eastcastle st.