May 18, 2016

We’ve Lowered Our Prices on (Nearly) All of Our Home Aroma Training Kits

In an effort to bring the joys of intelligent sniffing to more people, the Aroma Academy US has dropped prices on its Bourbon, Scotch and Irish, and gin home study kits 25%. The 24 aroma training can now be had for under $150.

In addition, we’ve added two introductory, 12 aroma kits for less than $100. Those kits cover Scotch and Irish whiskies and wine. This compares with the $120 charged by Nez de Vin for their 12 aroma introductory kits.

Aroma Academy has trained thousands of drinks professionals how to effectively assess the aromas of fine wines and spirits. Instead of breaking down the complicated nose of a fine spirit or wine, our program uses purified aromatics essences to introduce individual aromas. Our professional training courses have received extraordinarily high praise from participants.

Click here to get a look at our product line.

Click here to see a video on the basics of intelligent nosing.

May 4, 2016

Sniffing Gin in St. Louis

Tom Johnson Events

Every year, Natasha “The Gin Girl” Bahrami hosts St. Louis Gin Fest, an event where the participants’ joy is tinged with juniper. This year, Aroma Academy US will lead a Gin Fest seminar on the aromas of gin.

If there’s a spirit with a broader stylistic range than gin, we’d like to smell it. There are literally hundreds of new gins hitting the market, most produced by craft distilleries driven to be different. The creativity is as inspiring as the aromas are surprising. We’re going to cram as much into our allotted time as possible, but count on this: we’ll take a deep dive into Citadelle, a French gin that traces its roots back to the 18th Century.

We’ll be in Natasha’s Gin Room in St. Louis May 21 at three o’clock. We’ll be armed with 24 distinct aromas from gin. We’ll take a deep dive into Citadelle, a French gin produced by one the leading distillers of fine Cognac.

If you’re in the neighborhood, tickets to Gin Fest can be had here. If you’re not, you can buy one of our home study kits here.

March 30, 2016

The Basics of Aroma Academy’s Training, Explained

Tom Johnson Blog, Wisdom

Kim Lahiri, Aroma Academy’s worldwide head of training, stopped by a few weeks ago. We put her in front of a camera and, without professional lighting or more than ten minutes prep time, she did a good job of explaining what users should do when they open their home training kits.

March 29, 2016

Articulating the Power of Aroma

Tom Johnson Blog, Just for Fun

A study in the Journal of Psychopharmacology indicates that the smell of alcohol makes people more likely to drink. This may have to do with pleasant associations, like warm times with friends and past enjoyable experiences. Here’s an interesting pull-quote about the power of the sense of smell:

“The smell in an old cupboard can remind us of a fond relative, for instance. The same is true for alcohol. I know some people who cannot stand the sight nor the smell of a certain drink, because it reminds them of a past, unpleasant, experience resulting from drinking too much of that drink.”

An aroma’s ability to bring back deep memories is marvelous, but in the methodical analysis of fine drinks can be confusing. A smell that piques a specific memory can, perhaps paradoxically, make it harder to articulate the aroma. It’s hard for anyone else to know what your grandmother’s cookies smelled like, for example. So we teach a new association with a particular aroma. We wouldn’t rob you of the pleasant memory of your grandmother’s kitchen. We just teach you to recognize that aroma as a combination of vanilla and pecans and butter. Those are terms other people can understand.

March 21, 2016

Cuban Rum is On It’s Way

Tom Johnson Blog, Just for Fun

While there is no firm timetable for the opening of trade between the U.S. and Cuba, President Obama is on a rum run to Havana, so we’ve asked him to bring back some samples.

While he’s gone, we’ll look back on the the last visit to Cuba by an American President, Calvin Coolidge. Prohibition was the law of the land in the US, and when Silent Cal and his press entourage landed in Havana, everyone went, basically, nuts. Here’s an account from a journalist traveling with the President:

“Pretty much everyone in the presidential party, except the highest officials, hit the hot streets of Havana, and enjoyed their first legal drinks in years. The Cuban government sent some police officials to make sure the Americans had a good time. Quite a party of us trooped off with them to see the sights, not all of which were culturally elevating.”

When the trip was over, the press corps took advantage of the President’s customs-free re-entry into the US by smuggling hundreds of bottles of Cuban rum.

March 14, 2016

The Continuum of Bourbon Aromas

Tom Johnson Blog, Input

Bourbon writer/historian/expert Michael Veach took one of our full-day whiskey training classes a few weeks ago. We thought it a good sign when he bought a kit on the way out the door. Even better, he wrote us up on his widely read BourbonVeach.com blog. Here’s an excerpt:

The results of these experiments for me was that whiskey is too complicated to ever really duplicate from individual aromas, but there is great value in examining and identifying aromas found in the spirit. The Bourbon Aroma Kit is valuable in the it will help identify that nagging un-named aroma in the glass. The fact that the aroma will change as it breathes is important to know. The brief whiff of green bananas may be leading into green apple and eventually ripe apple in the whiskey, all from the same source of aroma.

He has a point about the complexity of Bourbon aromas being too much to put into a finite kit. But we’re not trying to provide an encyclopaedia of wine and spirits aromas. We’re providing waypoints you can use to navigate that vast continuum of aromas that exist in the nose of a fine spirit or wine.

Think of aroma as a rainbow. Just as it’s impossible to discern where red turns to orange, it’s impossible to define precisely where caramel turns to brown sugar. To avoid getting lost in the rainbow’s infinite hues, it helps to have a sample of pure red and pure orange. In nosing whiskey, it’s equally useful to be familiar with the aromas of pure caramel and pure brown sugar.

March 1, 2016

Learning Moment at the Bourbon Classic

Tom Johnson Blog

We had a table at The Bourbon Classic in Louisville over the weekend. Since it was a Bourbon event, we offered Bourbon’s defining aromas to the curious: vanilla, caramel, maple syrup, butterscotch. They’re all base aromas that remain long after the fresh top notes (e.g., orange peel) have evaporated away, and they’re all in the same family of sweet aromas.

People would walk up and we’d offer them an aroma to see if they could identify it. Just about everyone got their first aroma wrong. That’s no big deal, of course, and we had a lot of fun offering those who identified butterscotch as maple syrup a whiff of maple syrup to illustrate the difference.

Teachers like to talk about “light bulb moments,” when their student suddenly get it. We had a lot of those, but one stands out because the woman’s experience with our kits was so perfectly illustrative of what we’re trying to do.

She walked up to the table and we handed her a strip dipped in caramel aroma. She sniffed it and announced confidently, “Pecan.”

Of all the senses, aroma is the least conscious. There are blurred lines and overlapping memories all through our untrained senses of smell. This was a perfect example. Clearly, the caramel aroma had triggered in her a memory. We asked her what her favorite candy is.

“Turtles,” she replied, and there you have it: a perfect moment for learning. Turtles are chocolate, caramel, and pecans, and those aromas have blended together in her mind into a single thing. To pull those aroma memories apart, we set her up with some nut aromas. She went back and forth, from strip to strip, separating in her mind the suddenly distinct scents of pecans and caramel. It is a distinction she will remember for a long time, and we will, too.

March 1, 2016

In Indianapolis, the USBG is offering it’s members Aroma Academy training at a deep discount

Tom Johnson Events

As part of its commitment to advancing the careers of its members, the U.S. Bartender’s Guild Indianapolis chapter is hosting Aroma Academy’s full-day training in whiskey aromatics.

Aroma Academy has trained thousands of mixologists, servers, retailers, and distributors around the world in the aromatics of fine spirits and wine. For the first time, this training is available in Indiana.

Kim Lahiri, Aroma Academy’s head of training in Europe, will guide the class, which is limited to 40 people. Participants will learn how to identify and articulate the aromas that combine into the nose of fine Bourbon, Scotch, and Irish whiskeys. Those aromas make up 95% of what is perceived as flavor.

No matter how many tastings you’ve attended, until you’ve been trained to identify the aromas that combine into the nose of fine spirits, you’ll never fully understand what’s in the glass.

We’ll start the day building understanding of how aromatics works: how humans perceive smell; how differences in production techniques, environment, and tradition influence the spirit’s nose; and how an individual’s subjective olfactory experience can be translated into a common language understandable to all.

When the class is done, attendees will have a much deeper understanding of how a whiskey (or whisky) will be perceived both on its own and in the context of a cocktail.

The USBG and its sponsors are deeply discounting the training for members. Members of USBG-Indianapolis can reserve space here.

Remember, seating is very limited, so sign up now.

February 9, 2016

In Louisville, the Capital of Bourbon,
We’re Teaching About a Whole World of Whiskeys

Tom Johnson Events

On February 24, Aroma Academy U.S. brings a new kind of whiskey training to the United States. You can go to as many tastings as you like, but until you’re trained in the aromatics of fine whiskey, you’re never going to really understand what’s in your glass.

Kim Lahiri, Aroma Academy’s head of training in Europe, will guide the class, which is limited to 40 people. Participants will learn how to identify and articulate the aromas that combine into the noses of fine Bourbon, Scotch, and Irish whiskeys. Those aromas make up 95% of what is perceived as flavor.

When the full-day class is done, attendees will have a much deeper understanding of how a whiskey (or whisky) will be perceived both on its own and in the context of a cocktail. And, as a side benefit, they’ll have their palates good and ready for the Bourbon Classic that weekend.

Remember, seating is very limited, so sign up now.

February 8, 2016

Hey Chicago! Become an expert on the aromas of Bourbon, Scotch, and Irish Whiskeys in a Single Day

Tom Johnson Events

Chicago gets first crack at Aroma Academy training that has enhanced the careers of thousands of drinks professionals in Europe and the Far East. This training has been offered nowhere else in North America.

We’re doing a special, one-day overview of the world’s great whiskeys led by Kim Lahiri, the head of Aroma Academy’s training in the United Kingdom. You’ll learn to identify and articulate the aromas that combine into the nose of fine Bourbon, Scotch, and Irish whiskeys.

No matter how many tastings you’ve attended, until you’ve been trained to identify the aromas that combine into the nose of fine spirits, you’ll never fully understand what’s in the glass. Those aromas make up 95% of what is perceived as flavor.

We’ll start the day building your understanding of how aromatics works: how humans perceive smell; how differences in production techniques, environment, and tradition influence the spirit’s nose; and how an individual’s subjective olfactory experience can be translated into a common language understandable to all.

When you’re done, you’ll have a much deeper understanding of how a whiskey (or whisky) will be perceived both on its own and in the context of a cocktail.

Join us Monday, February 22, at The Chicago Distilling Company. Seating is limited. Lunch will be served.

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