Introduction

Beverages are an important part of life and are an easy way for people to experience something new and interesting. Good drinks contribute to social interactions and simple joy. But more importantly for you, it is a way to take your skills to the next level and create flavours that are not just mixing other companies’ products together but making new flavours yourself.

One of the key issues with flavour development is that most information comes from books published a century ago or more. Most modern information seems tightly controlled by companies as it is their intellectual property, which is fair. However, knowing where to start for someone getting into flavour development can be a challenge. The original books are a good starting point, but much of that information is outdated by at least 100 years, though the techniques are still useful for small-scale work. This course is designed to give you a concise summary of flavour development, using modern techniques and understanding that can be useful for beverage development as well as culinary applications like the development of sauces and syrups. 

What This Course Is

This course is for anyone wanting to develop a unique beverage but with limited experience working with professional flavour compounds. Upon completion of this course, you will be able to formulate a beverage with the proper/natural levels of flavour compounds and create 1-litre taste samples for prototyping the flavoured beverage, and then you can take that formulation and scale it up for beverage production or just to introduce new drinks at your bar. This course will help you prototype a beverage using sound techniques and flavour compounds that professional flavour makers use. 

We will also focus on how to work with flavours safely, and a variety of source materials will be provided to guide you on what flavour levels to use. A custom technique has been designed for this course so you can avoid math calculations when dosing the flavour compounds. With a couple of simple tools and two easy dilutions, you will be able to dose the flavour compounds accurately in the part per million range, with no math.

If you considered hiring a flavour chemist to develop your product and you want an alternative, this is the course for you. The skills taught in this course will allow you to effectively become your own flavour chemist. These skills will also allow you to communicate and understand the development process and can be a great benefit even if you are working with a consultant.

What This Course Is Not

The core of this course is focused on developing flavours for beverages, not on commercialization. Though there is tangential information on things like shelf stability and beverage production, the goal is small-scale experimentation though the recipes you create using these techniques can easily be scaled. The recipes created here will only have a short shelf life of a week or so. Future courses will focus on shelf-stability, packaging, preservation, and other details needed to bring these prototype formulas into commercial production.

People seek out new experiences. However, these new experiences are often anchored by something familiar, like variations of a familiar beverage. Vanilla Coke or one of the many variations of an Old Fashioned Cocktail, or a Martini.

The goal is to help you understand how to develop flavours that can be used in beverages and, in some cases, food items like sauces and syrups (e.g. dessert-type syrups). It is one thing to make drinks for yourself; it is another to make drinks for others, as people have certain expectations regarding what they eat and drink. For example, cloudy or separated beverages are often perceived as being expired or contaminated.

Certificate of Achievement

This course is also a certificate course because what you are about to learn isn’t necessarily easy, though I’ll do everything I can to help you understand it, and you need recognition for your effort. Continuing your education is important, and if I were an employer and noticed on a resume or during an interview that you are self-motivated enough to invest in your education continually, that would put you head-and-shoulders about other candidates who did not continue their education. It means you are willing to learn new things, which is a valuable skill in this ever-changing world.

Many Methods

It needs to be noted that there are many ways to create a beverage and this course is designed to give people, without a scientific background, an easy way to do it. Over time I will introduce different methods that fit specific applications. But know there are many ways to develop a flavour and then apply that to a beverage, and no single method will work for everything. As to which method works best for your application, that will require understanding your components and some research. This course aims to help you understand the components and how to research.

The Future of Beverages

Sales of Non-alcoholic Beverages are Forecast to Reach US$1,889.42 Billion by 2034

Follow Up Videos

Though I’ve tried to make this course as thorough as possible, there may be points where clarification or additional information will be required to ensure you have a strong understanding of the material presented here. This means there will be updates to course sections and topics and in some cases I may add an additional explainer video. When new material is added, I will send out an email notification to all registered students with direct links to the supplementary info.