Jeebus at Szechuan Gourmet

originally posted by John Donaghue:
As far as I know diacetyl is actually used to create artificial butter flavoring, thus the obvious similarity.
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Oh absolutely, it is artifical butter flavor. What Mark and I are speaking to is smelling diacetyl in wines is completely different than a real "butter" note. They are quite different to me (real butter and diacetyl.)

Diacetyl production is very common in the beer industry, epecially among lager yeast strains. Special handling (an end of fermentation raising of the temperature, known as a "diacetyl rest") is very common to reduce the levels of diacetyl in the finished beer. Diacetyl detection thresholds also range widely from person to person.

Cheers,

Kevin
 
originally posted by Kevin Roberts:
originally posted by John Donaghue:
As far as I know diacetyl is actually used to create artificial butter flavoring, thus the obvious similarity.
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Diacetyl detection thresholds also range widely from person to person.

Cheers,

Kevin
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Really? In my (unpublished) findings from my masters work, this was not the case. Are there experimental results out there? I don't keep up with the chemical senses literature.

As for beer, would diacetyl explain the banana in my de Groens dopplebock?
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
originally posted by Kevin Roberts:
They are quite different to me (real butter and diacetyl.)
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Why do you think diacetyl is "butter," then, just out of curiosity from afar?
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In many (most?) concentrations, diacetyl smells like butter. It is in many, many products.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
originally posted by VLM:
banana
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More typically isoamyl acetate.
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In higher concentrations (or is it lower) diacetyl is described as tropical. It's been a long time, I can't remember whether it was banana or not. Anyway, I'm sure you are correct, just curious.
 
originally posted by VLM:
In many (most?) concentrations, diacetyl smells like butter. It is in many, many products.
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I guess that gets into the whole fake aroma thing. Cherry candy not tasting like actual cherries. Or the whole truffle oil phenom.

But it's interesting, or would be enlightening, to hear why certain aspects of a more complex flavor are singled out in its synthetic version.

-I Can't Believe It's Not Better
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
originally posted by VLM:
In many (most?) concentrations, diacetyl smells like butter. It is in many, many products.
Click to expand...

I guess that gets into the whole fake aroma thing. Cherry candy not tasting like actual cherries. Or the whole truffle oil phenom.

But it's interesting, or would be enlightening, to hear why certain aspects of a more complex flavor are singled out in its synthetic version.

-I Can't Believe It's Not Better
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Truffle oil phenomena is different, I think.

Put together by someone who knows what they are doing, there is no way you could tell the difference in aroma between diacetyl and actual butter.
 
originally posted by VLM:

Put together by someone who knows what they are doing, there is no way you could tell the difference in aroma between diacetyl and actual butter.
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I'm not sure that's true, o scalar one.

Real butter has a bunch of different things going on. Esters, acids long and short, all kinds of stuff.

Diacetyl is probably the major axis, but there are plenty of other vectors in the space.
 
This is a decent summary of the diacetyl pathway in beer.

Once you remove the yeast (rack the beer off the primary fermentation lees) you remove the ability to remove the diacetyl formed.

The other good point he makes is there are 2 ways to form diacetyl 1) normal fermentation 2) lactobacillus/pediococcus infection, and since lactobacillus is mr. malolactic fermentation a lack of yeast to metabolize it can be an issue.
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
originally posted by Kevin Roberts:
They are quite different to me (real butter and diacetyl.)
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Why do you think diacetyl is "butter," then, just out of curiosity from afar?
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I'm a chemist who used to work in the research department at Land O' Lakes, (tasting panels!) I also make quite a bit of beer, which I taste all of the way through the process. (And I've been to enough homebrew club meetings to taste more than enough shitty homebrew to last a lifetime.)

Unfortunately I can't taste anything with perceptable diacetyl in it as anything other than diacetyl. I'm sure that if I didn't exactly what diacetyl smelled and tasted like, I'd say they smelled/tasted buttery too. Sometimes too much experience is a bad thing. I also think my detection threshold is lower than it used to be, but that too could be a palate training issue.

And, well, then there's this brought to us by our friends at www.popcornlung.com!

Cheers,

Kevin
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
originally posted by VLM:

Put together by someone who knows what they are doing, there is no way you could tell the difference in aroma between diacetyl and actual butter.
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I'm not sure that's true, o scalar one.

Real butter has a bunch of different things going on. Esters, acids long and short, all kinds of stuff.

Diacetyl is probably the major axis, but there are plenty of other vectors in the space.
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Sometimes one dimension is all the granularity you need.

Sure, butter is complex, but diacetyl used well can fool most of the people most of the time.
 
originally posted by Brézème:
A very special place (soils are very complicated and can change a lot from one vineyard to another), warmer than Brézème, but the vines there have been cultivated for generations without chemicals (not even copper) and some of the older vineyards (70 years old) are totally clone free (they use marcottage to replace died vines.

Due to the soil (Gneiss, sandstone, decomposed granit) the wine is much closer to Cornas in style than to Brézème (limestone and clay).
Of course whole cluster, short maceration native yeasts and no so2 before bottling.
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Just had a bottle yesterday evening. WOW!
 
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