Vodka Flavor Profile: One-Dimensional by Design

Vodka is the best place to start palate training because the target is strict: it should not have a front-of-mouth “heads” signature and it should not have a tails finish. It should be quiet.

You’ll build the tasting grid and use vodka as the benchmark profile. Once you can spot vodka mistakes, the same method makes fruit brandy and whiskey much easier to judge.

Quick summary

Build the 3x3 grid

The grid has three mouth zones and three intensity levels. You plot where flavor shows up and how strong it is.

How do we go from this model to an objective taste model? Front of mouth, middle of mouth, and back of mouth. You now know that these associate with head smearing, pure hearts in the substrate, and tail smearing, where we have those rooty and earthy flavors.

First second, second two to six, and everything after seven seconds. So you start counting and see where those flavors hit you. And what I added to the grid is an intensity level.

Mouth position

Front of mouth is the first second. Middle of mouth is seconds two to six. Back of mouth is anything after seven seconds, toward the throat.

Three is like full flavored, a lot of flavor. There's some flavor there, but you sort of have to search for it. So now all of a sudden, based on the Holy Trinity, and based on intensity of flavors, we can have a grid that consists of nine squares.

You can start to square out what you're tasting. And then make sure that what you taste actually corroborates with how a product should taste. So what I've done here is basically I've drawn three grids, one, two, and three, of three normal product or spirit categories.

Intensity 1–3

Intensity 1 is light (you have to search for it). Intensity 2 is clear flavor. Intensity 3 is strong, “wow” flavor.

Of course, they can change a little bit. But this is like normally how a certain spirit should taste. And maybe these empty ones stand for the bottle that you bought in the store and that you're testing together with a partner, together with a friend, together with a buddy, together with your husband or wife in order to train your palate.

If it's the same spirit category, it should have the same kind of definition. It should have the axis on the same places. And if it doesn't, what does that tell you about the product?

What “correct vodka” looks like

The ideal vodka is almost empty on the grid: no front-of-mouth and no back-of-mouth marks. The only thing you may notice is a light middle-of-mouth signature of the substrate (for example, rye vs wheat).

The idea is purity: cut out heads, cut out tails, and leave only a clean hearts core.

How could you change that during distillation or fermentation? The first one highlights a product that apparently doesn't have flavor in the beginning. Nothing hits you in that first second of tasting, first second after swallowing the spirit.

Nothing happens at the back of your mouth. There is basically nothing happening at the beginning and at the end. The only thing you might notice is a little bit of flavor, a little bit because we're at level one here in the middle from second two to second six.

The common vodka mistake: fruity front end

A common store-bought vodka mistake described is fruity sweetness at the beginning. Treat that as a heads-cut mistake: too much head smearing was kept, often because it increases yield.

No beginning, no end, a low flavor profile in the only category that can be available, the middle of mouth region. This is the perfect way to describe a perfect vodka. So if you make vodka, and you already started training on the iZotone Mini, right?

If you start making vodka and you get this flavor profile, it's pretty much a perfect vodka. There's a hint of the substrate it's made from. You might be able to say like, this is a rye, this is a rye vodka.

A practical fix: rerun and cut more heads

The practical challenge given is to rerun a vodka on a small still, make a stronger heads cut, and dilute the result back to 40%. The claim is you can remove that fruity dimension and bring the profile back to how vodka should taste.

If you want fruit character, a practical suggestion is doing it intentionally through infusion rather than by leaving heads in your vodka.

You're not going to talk about fruitiness. You're not going to distinguish if it's well made. Your taste sensation, if there's going to be a sensation, is going to be very limited between seconds two and six.

Anything after that is bad, because there shouldn't be a cross here, because, hey, there isn't. Anything in the first second shouldn't be there either. It tells you something about vodka, and we'll elaborate on that, not in this series of videos, but a bit later.

Key Takeaways