It worked!

Some time ago I looked at using an aroma kit to help improve my ability to pick out and identify aromas in the spirits that I drink. You can buy an aroma kit but those tend to start around $150 and go up to $450, which is a bit steep for me. And, given the fact that some of the customer reviews are less than stellar, I decided to try and make my own kit. I ended up making 13 bottles with common gin botanicals all for less than $30!

After letting the botanicals to macerate for a month of so, the aromas were still clear but I did notice one issue. While I only filled the bottles 2/3 with botanicals, some of the more fibrous botanical like cardamon, anise seeds, and licorice root absorbed a lot of the vodka and swelled to completely fill the bottle where as more woody botanicals like cinnamon and star anise stayed the same size. So if you make your own aroma kit, make note of which botanicals might be more absorbent than others.

Besides this absorbency issue, the aroma samples worked well. From time to time I would sit down with the bottles, unscrew the lid, and smell the aroma moving the opening back and forth between each nostril.

Being able to pick out and describe aromas in spirits has a lot to do with memory. Our eyes or ears take in information from specific wave lengths of light or sound and those are interpreted by our brains as colors and pitch. But with smell, little particles of the things we eat, drink, or inhale, touch receptors that extend from the olfactory bulb in our brain and we interpret that information based on our memory. It is believed that this link between smell and memory helps humans to avoid eating spoiled food or drinking contaminated water. And, this smell memory may have helped our hunter-gatherer ancestors to remember high calorie foods like fruits that are higher in natural sugar and vitamins.

In my experience, interpreting aromas exists on three levels.

1. Is the aroma good or bad?

2. Is the aroma familiar or unfamiliar?

3. Can I describe or name the aroma with a word or words?

I believe using my kit did help me move some of the aromas from the second level of, is it familiar to the third level of, it is familiar and I my brain remembers the name of that smell. If you are interested in improving your smell memory, making and occasionally using a spirits aroma kit will help.