An Australian woman loves making sense of beer.
Briony Liebich, who has worked in the beer industry for two decades, often gets asked to describe what she does as a professional sensory analyst.
“A sensory analyst works with how products look, smell, taste, and feel,” Liebich, who runs beer education and sensory consulting business Flavour Logic, said of her job title in a recent Instagram post.
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“It’s about using trained senses to evaluate quality, consistency, and detailed sensory characteristics,” she continued. “Flavor is a language. I help people learn how to speak it. I help connect what you experience when you eat or drink to what’s actually happening in the product.”
Over the years, Liebich has explained to her online followers how she fell in love with food and drink at an early age.
“I grew up helping at my family's winery and vineyard in Barossa Valley [a South Australian wine region], which is where my passion for food and drink began,” she shared of her upbringing on Instagram.
Liebich eventually found work in winery labs before spending time in Europe to go on tasting adventures. Then, she returned to her homeland and turned her “love of tasting into a career back in Australia.”
“I fell into a sensory role doing wine and food sensory research projects and product development,” she continued, adding that this led her to work at West End Brewery in Adelaide for 10 years.
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When that business closed, Liebich went her own way and launched her Flavour Logic consulting business because she enjoys “tasting, talking to people about flavors and helping boost their sensory skills.”
In a recent interview with Australian women’s lifestyle site 9Honey, Liebich said she first discovered her passion for tasting while doing wine research before transitioning primarily to beer research, admitting, “I discovered I was really good at it, and I love doing it.”
She also explained to whom this profession could be a dream job.
“If you’re happy to just sit with a lineup of four different beers, smell them, and think, ‘How does this feel in my mouth? Is it creamy? Is it astringent?’ Then you’ll be a good sensory analyst,” she said, adding that her tastings usually happen in the mornings so she can complete other tasks later on.
“We don’t taste all day, but we do talk about tasting, plan tastings, and analyse data from tastings," she said to 9Honey, noting that “using a group of tasters provides more reliable data” during tastings because “we have different moods, different skills and different genetics.”