bitterness

Bitterness in Beverage Formulation

July 2, 2023 by Alan McClure

The beverage industry has witnessed a remarkable transformation in recent years, with an influx of small businesses dedicated to creating high-quality, smaller-batch products. This diversification has led to an explosion of unique flavors and ingredients, pushing the boundaries of traditional beverage offerings.

Once upon a time, a “soft drink” was basically water, sugar (often corn syrup), flavoring, color, and maybe caffeine.

Believe it or not, Coke and Sprite are essentially the same recipe—except for a touch of herbal flavor and that iconic caramel coloring (plus the caffeine of course).

Fortunately, creative beverage producers have broken free of the mold, reaching for new heights of uniqueness and ingredient use. But along with this delightful new turn in gourmet and high-quality beverages, comes a huge increase in the importance of understanding bitterness.

One of the 5 basic taste categories, bitterness can add complexity and depth to beverages, though it can also turn off consumers for various reasons. Sometimes bitterness is part of the charm. Lots of delicious common beverages are bitter: coffee, tea, beer, tonic water, wine, grapefruit juice, numerous classic cocktails…

But when bitterness isn’t desired, or when it’s poorly balanced, it can be quite unpleasant for the consumer—especially for those unfortunate (but not uncommon) folks called “super tasters” who have high bitter sensitivity due to genetic contribution. Not so “super” for drink manufacturers…but fortunately there are plenty of ways to handle bitterness, even for the extrasensitive.

So let’s talk about naturally occurring bitterness in beverages, and the different ingredients that contribute to this controversial taste sensation.

How do you measure bitterness in foods & beverages?

Beer drinkers are readily familiar with IBUs. It’s an easy way of helping customers narrow their choices based on how bitter they prefer their beer.

However the IBU is not a measurement of perceived bitterness; but rather the amount of iso-alpha acid (derived from hops) that’s dissolved in the solution, where 1 IBU = 1 ppm (or 1 mg/L).

So it only works with beer. And it’s really only a rough indicator, because you can sweeten a high-IBU beer to a point that it no longer tastes bitter, but still has a high concentration of iso-alpha acids.

Another, more generalized way of measuring bitterness is Bitterness value, which is based on the smallest concentration of 1 gram of a substance dissolved in water, that can still be tasted as bitter.

This scale centers around the perceived bitterness of quinine (an alkaloid extracted from chinchona bark) which still delivers a bitter taste all the way to 1 g dissolved in 2 liters2000 mL of water.

On that scale, quinine has a bitterness value of 200,000. Pure caffeine has a similar value, though somewhat less.

And by the way, the most bitter natural substance is gentian root, which boasts a bitterness value of 58 million. Which means 1g of gentian extract can bitter up to 58,000 liters of water! That’s enough to fill a 9 x 4 meter backyard pool!

While this scale provides a numerical value for bitterness, it is crucial to remember that taste perception is highly subjective, influenced by personal preference and biological factors such as individual tastebud distribution and age.

What ingredients add bitterness to foods & beverages?

For beverage products like nutraceuticals, energy drinks, and carbonated soft drinks—whether clean-label or otherwise—there are a lot of ways to get the flavors and effects you want to give to your customers.

But many of these natural ingredients are inherently bitter, and require some kind of bitterness management.

Stimulants

Natural stimulant ingredients like caffeine, theobromine (found in cacao and small amounts in tea & coffee), mateine (found in yerba mate), and guaranine (found in guarana) can impart bitterness to beverages.

While these compounds are known for their uplifting effects, their bitterness can vary depending on factors such as the roast level of coffee beans or the percentage of cacao in chocolate.

Fun fact: when training for expert sensory analysis of bitterness, the reference material used is a solution of pure caffeine.

Alcohol

Ethanol (drinking alcohol) is a naturally bitter compound. The method of producing, refining, and aging the ultimate product contributes to the character and level of bitterness—because of compounds such as tannins, phenols, and hop-derived extracts. Which are responsible for the underlying bitterness balanced to perfection (one hopes) in wines, spirits, and beers.

Herbal & botanical bitterness

Many of the most common herbs & botanicals used for creating clean-label flavors add an element of bitterness. And some may surprise you, because their bitterness is usually balanced by other elements (cinnamon, for example, adds bitterness but we usually associate it with desserts).

Classic bitter beverage ingredients:

Chamomile
Dandelion
Citrus peels
Rhubarb
Grapefruit
Cranberry
Quinine
Wormwood
Gentian root

These natural compounds can add complexity and desirable astringency to a beverage formulation, but they can also be overdone to disastrous effect. (Ever leave cinnamon sticks too long in your hot cider? Yech!)

Cannabinoids

With the increasing popularity of cannabis-infused beverages, it’s important to understand how cannabinoids like THC and CBD, can introduce bitterness to a recipe. You can’t just add cannabis extract to your recipe and send it out. There’s work to do first…

Ways to balance & mask bitterness in beverage products

Creating a well-balanced and enjoyable beverage that’s more than just sugar, water, and artificial flavors, generally requires some degree of bitterness management.

There are three main ways to approach this:

Flavor (aroma) synergy:

Combining bitter ingredients with complementary aromas (often mis-termed as “flavors”), can help balance the overall gustatory profile. Aromas can add pleasant associations and context to bitterness.

For example, herbal bitterness can be mellowed by incorporating fruity or floral notes (a la strawberry/rhubarb). Grapefruit aroma is also particularly adept at making bitter beverage elements seem fitting and balanced. This synergy can create a more harmonious and pleasant flavor experience overall.

Taste synergy:

The term “taste” technically refers to the 5 types of flavor receptors we have: bitter, sweet, sour, salty, and umami. This method of balancing bitterness factors in foundational ingredients that bring taste but not aroma; like sugar, citric acid, water, and salt.

By carefully selecting and blending ingredients, beverage creators can manipulate the balance of bitterness. Different ratios and combinations of bitter and counterpart tastes (such as sugar) can lead to a well-balanced flavor profile, ensuring that bitterness does not overpower the drink. Skillful blending can result in a nuanced taste that appeals to a wide range of palates.

Bitterness suppression

Some ingredients have the ability to mask, diminish, or suppress the bitter taste of others. This includes simple, time-honored tricks—as well as high-level food-science techniques.

As you surely know, beverage producers all too often take the easy route—using large amounts of high-intensity sweeteners like stevia or monkfruit extract; which can help blot out bitterness while still maintaining a desirable level of sweetness. However, many consumers are quite sensitive to such non-nutritive sweeteners, which often carry off-flavors of their own (expecially at higher concentrations) sometimes even adding MORE bitterness to the aftertaste. So use with caution, and test via consumer analysis.

Getting more advanced; microencapsulation is a food chemistry technology that encloses bitter compounds within a hollow sugar molecule that prevents them from interacting with taste receptors on their way to the stomach, where the encapsulation readily breaks down.

This technique is especially useful for cannabis edibles, where you want those active ingredients to digest into the bloodstream, but not impart their highly bitter characteristics.

Don’t leave bitterness up to chance

Bitterness, though subjective, plays a crucial role in creating complex and intriguing flavor profiles in beverages and other foods. Understanding the ingredients that contribute to bitterness and using effective techniques to balance or mask it, is key to developing exceptional beverage products that keep your customers coming back for more.

However, crafting a quality beverage recipe formulation that effectively addresses bitterness requires expertise and an understanding of the science behind taste perception.

In this era of small businesses creating high-quality, smaller-batch products, the expertise of a food scientist can elevate your beverage offerings and help you stand out in a ridiculously crowded market.

An experienced food science consultant (not necessarily me—but I do have 20 years of award-winning formulation experience working with highly bitter ingredients) can help you develop innovative and market-ready beverages that fix bitterness naturally, while meeting consumer demands.

Want to develop a beverage that captivates the taste buds while addressing bitterness effectively? Reach out and let’s talk about how we can create a truly exceptional beverage formulation.

Nutraceutical Food Scientist vs ChatGPT Gummies – Part 1

April 4, 2023 by Alan McClure

You may have already considered turning to ChatGPT to find new functional food recipes.

If you’ve played around with it and you have any experience with making functional food products such as gummies, you may have noticed some chinks in the armor.

The first and last thing to remember about this program is that it is not sentient. It uses machine learning to sort through everything it can access on the internet–2021 and earlier– and pull an answer that its training says best fits your question.

First I asked ChatGPT 3.5 how to make the best vegan gummy.

It’s a simple, basic question that anyone searching for a gummy recipe might ask, whether it will stand alone, serve a functional role, or even be a medicinal cannabis edible.

I wanted a recipe that doesn’t use any animal-derived ingredient (i.e., no gelatin). I was expecting that ChatGPTwould probably suggest something fruit-flavored because that’s so common in the gummy world.

As far as plant-derived gelling agents go, I know from experience that the three most common are pectin, agar, and starch. For homemade gummies, starch is rarely the choice, as the specialized-for-confectionery modified starches are hard to acquire, and standard starches, like corn starch, doesn’t serve the role as well.

I also thought that if ChatGPT really understood “best” it would offer something with pectin, given the well-known excellent organoleptic characteristics that result from its use.

But this is what it came up with:

Here’s a recipe for making vegan gummies:
Ingredients:
1/2 cup of fruit juice (preferably low pH like lemon juice or orange juice)
1/4 cup of water
1 tablespoon of agar agar powder (a vegan alternative to gelatin)
1/2 teaspoon of citric acid
1/4 teaspoon of salt
Optional: functional ingredient
Equipment:
Silicone gummy molds
Saucepan
Whisk
Dropper or syringe
Instructions:
In a saucepan, mix together the fruit juice, water, agar agar powder, citric acid, and salt.
Whisk the mixture together over low heat until the agar agar powder dissolves completely.
Add the optional functional ingredient.
Remove the saucepan from the heat and let it cool for a few minutes.
Using a dropper or syringe, fill the silicone gummy molds with the mixture.
Place the molds in the refrigerator for 30-60 minutes to let the gummies set.
Once the gummies have set, remove them from the molds and store them in an airtight container in the refrigerator.
That’s it! This recipe should yield about 20-30 gummies, depending on the size of your molds. Make sure to label your gummies and keep them out of reach of children or pets
ChatGPT 3.5

Don’t use this ChatGPT gummy recipe!

TLDR: It will turn out sour and may not even gel.

Let me break down what went wrong, and then I’ll ask it a more specific question.

Precision measuring

Generally speaking, it’s better to measure by mass/weight than by volume. Ingredients tend to vary in density from producer to producer. For example ¼ tsp. salt will have a different mass of salt depending on the grain/flake shape and size. Which can change the flavor drastically, especially when you scale up for market (which you can’t realistically do volumetrically with dry ingredients).

It’s not surprising that ChatGPT pulled a gummy recipe with volume-based measurement. It’s just drawing from what’s available on the internet—which leans toward American preferences, and American households still don’t often have scales in their kitchens. But if you’re making gummies commercially, definitely measure your recipe by weight.

Flavor

It makes sense to see fruit as the basis of this recipe. Fruit juices and purees are common gummy ingredients.

But I am surprised to see it suggest a low pH (high acid) juice like lemon, especially since citric acid (which makes lemon sour) is also included.

People generally prefer their fruit-flavored gummies to be sweet—and there is essentially no sugar in this recipe, especially if you go with lemon juice. But even orange, pineapple, or some other juice would skew toward the sour side…and without adding additional sugar to balance it, I suspect these gummies would taste quite harsh.

Okay but let’s say you’re averse to sugar, or you just like things super sour—there’s still the fact that many functional ingredients are inherently bitter.

As any chef or food scientist knows, bitterness is enhanced by acid and mitigated by sweetness. So a recipe this sour would potentially be unpalatably bitter, without adding ingredients to manage bitterness.

And if we’re talking about flavor, we can’t just talk about sour, bitter, and sweet.

We also have to consider one of the biggest flavor factors in any recipe: aroma! It can’t just be an afterthought.

You have to consider all the ingredients that add aroma to the recipe, and in the case of the ChatGPT one above, there isn’t much. Various extracts from fruit or spices are commonly used to add flavor to cooked confectionery such as gummies. Without them, you can end up with a very boring product. Cooking down lemon or orange juice, for example, results in a kind of “canned” washed-out flavor, and it’s not a good look. But imagine the essence of the zest of a lemon or orange rind, or excellent bourbon vanilla extract. Such ingredients can be used to great effect.

Using agar for gummies

Why did ChatGPT choose agar as a baseline for the gummies? It’s impossible to know for sure, but my guess is that more people use agar because it’s easier to work with and doesn’t require a specific pH range and sugar concentration in order to gel.

Pectin is, for lack of a better word, more difficult.

And if you Google “vegan agar gummy” versus “vegan pectin gummy” you’ll notice there are almost 25% more instances of agar.

Of course more doesn’t mean better. But ChatGPT has no way of knowing that. It has no mouth, taste buds, or experience-based understanding of flavor or mouthfeel.

Also, agar is known for having lots of variability in its gelling capacity, which is apparently based upon regional differences in chemical composition. This means sometimes even batch to batch variation of agar from the same manufacturer might cause noticeable texture differences.

Another major consideration is that agar needs to be heated to dissolve in water—but when acid is also involved, the agar begins to break down; which dramatically reduces its gelling capacity.

In other words step one—which calls for mixing the lemon juice, citric acid, and agar before heating—is not advised.

To do it right you would first cook agar in a sugar solution to a particular temperature or brix, and then cool it down to below 200° F before blending with acidic ingredients.

Because of agar’s flexibility, ChatGPT’s gummy recipe might work—but it would then be using significantly more agar than necessary, and therefore your cost of goods increases for no reason other than following ChatGPT’s wasteful practices.

Home gummy makers may not care, but business owners generally want to avoid wasting one of their more expensive gummy ingredients—when a slight change in process could solve the problem instead.

Remember, every inefficiency or extra cost magnifies significantly when you scale for manufacturing. And by then it’s too late…

Fortunately food science is here to rescue you from that sunk-cost fate.

Shelf life

Remember that absence of sugar and the short cooking time? That adds up to a real short shelf-life, which is related to water activity.

Sugar and salt dampen that activity (so to speak). Without them, even low pH foods can grow mold. Disgusting, yes—but some molds also produce toxins. Which can bring legal trouble on top of the guaranteed ick factor that’ll sink your brand. Can you imagine the Google reviews…?

Unless you want to trust vendors to keep your product refrigerated at all times, you definitely wouldn’t want to use this recipe for commercial purposes.

Always always always run any newly developed products through shelf-life testing. (Ask me how)

How to get a decent gummy recipe from ChatGPT

ChatGPT’s strengths are also its weaknesses. All it does is pull from what already exists online. It’s not actually creating anything truly new. It can’t determine what will work versus what will fall flat and why. It has no sense—it’s just a masterful indexer and data analyzer.

Laying aside its lack of sensory input and actual experience to focus on what does make it a useful tool—one perpetual problem with the program still is that it’s hard to know what you don’t know. Both for the AI itself and for the humans trying to train it to give useful responses.

For example, how could ChatGPT reasonably know that pectin is preferable over agar for its superior flavor release, or that pectin has a more familiar mouthfeel for westerners? We would likely have to force it to consider these issues in our original question, and to do that, we’d have to realize that they are potential problems in the first place, and unless you are a confectionery expert or food scientist, that would be very unlikely information for you to have.

That said, if ChatGPT were trained to take into account issues like flavor release, mouthfeel, flavor profiles, and so forth, it may be able to self-correct. Each new version of ChatGPT leaps closer and closer to truly useful and not just entertaining.

But in the meantime, just remember that better questions can produce better results. (Hey—just like in science!)

So this time I asked ChatGPT:

How to make the best vegan gummy using pectin & granulated sugar, a recipe that will result in gummies that actually set, with a good mouthfeel and flavor. Listing ingredients in metric weights.

And here’s what it came up with:

Ingredients:
250 ml fruit juice of your choice
10 g pectin
200 g granulated sugar
2 g citric acid
2 g vanilla extract
Optional: functional ingredient
Instructions:
In a small saucepan, combine the fruit juice and pectin. Whisk until the pectin is fully dissolved.
Add the sugar to the juice mixture and stir until it’s fully dissolved.
Heat the mixture over low heat and add the citric acid and vanilla extract. Stir well.
Continue heating the mixture over low heat, stirring occasionally, until it reaches 107°C. Use a candy thermometer to measure the temperature.
Remove the mixture from the heat and let it cool for a few minutes.
Add the optional functional ingredient and stir well.
Pour the mixture into a silicone gummy mold, filling each mold about 3/4 full.
Refrigerate the molds for at least an hour or until the gummies are firm.
Remove the gummies from the mold and store them in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.
Be sure to label your gummies clearly and keep them out of reach of children and pets.
ChatGPT 3.5

This recipe looks somewhat better—but even at a glance I can tally up several issues that would prevent this from ever exceeding mediocre.

It did get rid of the extra water, which bodes well for shelf life. It also added a thermometer to the process, which is imperative when using pectin (though its heat/time ratio is a problem). And the flavor balance seems much more palatable, with vanilla added for more pronounced flavor.

But again, this recipe is still rife with problems. It would never work as a product for any reputable functional food business. And depending upon the pH of the fruit you choose, it might not even gel, though with the significant amount of pectin called for, it might also gel very firmly.

Read how I solve these problems (and more) in the next chapter of Food Scientist vs ChatGPT – in which I work with a client to develop this gummy recipe into a delicious, high-quality, long-lasting, and viable product for the nutraceutical gummy market.

Follow our LinkedIn for updates & the next installment!

How To Fix Bitterness in Cannabis Edibles

May 21, 2022 by Alan McClure

Thanks to the slow but steady crawl toward legalization, more and more people are turning to cannabis as medicine or for recreation.

Led by gummies, cannabis edibles have quickly gobbled up a massive share of the $5 billion cannabis market—with a year-over-year sales growth of more than 20% in 2021—and total edibles sales are projected to reach $8 billion by 2025.

The industry is getting crowded but it’s still a goldrush. And it’s the perfect time for ambitious edibles producers to stake their claim with high-quality, standout cannabis products.

But there’s one big problem that every edibles maker must contend with: cannabis extracts are inherently bitter.

Ricardo Baca, former Editor in Chief of The Cannabist, said “One hundred percent of the edibles market is focused on removing that recognizable scent and flavor of the cannabis plant and replacing it with something that’s more aesthetically familiar.”

In fact, an entirely new industry has emerged within the $1.4 billion cannabis edibles market—whose sole purpose is overcoming the bitter and potentially off-putting flavors of marijuana.

So what can you do if your edibles come out too bitter?

There are a few different directions to take when it comes to fixing bitterness in edibles—but first let’s take a look at the science of bitterness and flavor.

How bitterness works

As we learned in school, bitterness is one of the five taste sensations (along with sweet, sour, salty, and umami) that are perceptible by the tongue—and one that is particularly useful for keeping us alive.

Many toxic plants and substances share similarities in molecular structures. So the ability to detect bitterness evolved as a “last chance” defense mechanism (once the toxin is already in your mouth!) causing an unpleasant experience—hopefully not too late.

Research has found that human taste receptors type 2 (T2Rs) and G-proteins like gustducin are responsible for our ability to taste bitter compounds. When you consume something bitter—let’s say quinine from the tonic in your G&T—the quinine compound binds to G-protein-coupled receptors like gustducin, which release several enzymes the taste cell uses to transmit the response via neurons to produce the cognitive experience of bitter.

Scientifically, bitter substances are rated relative to quinine (with a reference index of 1), ranging to the most bitter natural substance (gentian root) which has an index value of 5 million.

Okay so we know how bitterness works—but what can you do about bitterness in marijuana edibles?

Managing bitterness in cannabis edibles

Most cannabinoid extracts are intensely bitter, earthy, and often difficult to work with. When the raw product has such a dramatic impact on flavor, creating a formula for an infused product that tastes good and also delivers the expected amount of THC or CBD can require a bit of finesse and scientific precision.

For example, when it comes to emulsified cannabinoid products, the carrier oils and preservatives can actually intensify the bitterness. During the process of emulsification, when the cannabinoid particles are broken down into their smallest size, the increased surface area means more likelihood of transferring bitter flavors to the taste receptors.

Some people are proponents of keeping the herbaceous, bitter flavor of cannabis products—to remind people that what they’re consuming is medicine and not candy, hoping to limit accidental ingestion or overindulgence.

For those who don’t follow that school of thought, there are 3 main ways to deal with the inherent bitterness of cannabis:

Incorporate the flavor
Mask the flavor
Use a lower concentration

Incorporating bitterness flavor in edibles

The cheapest approach to bitterness in cannabis edibles starts with accepting the naturally bitter flavor of cannabis and working with it.

Adding other familiar flavors that are also bitter—such as cocoa, coffee, peppermint, and hops—can trick the brain into thinking, “Even though this tastes bitter, it’s a bitter flavor I enjoy.”

One method that any chef could tell you is taking advantage of the Maillard reaction (if it makes sense for your flavor profile). The browning of sugars and proteins adds a bitterness and aromatic complexity that we find pleasant and helps incorporate other bitter tastes for an overall positive flavor experience.

Bitterness can also be balanced by adding natural sweeteners—but that may not do much for the aftertaste, and can affect your calorie count and labeling. The bitter effect can also be impacted by sour ingredients like lemon juice or citric acid—but again that changes the whole flavor profile and limits your options.

Many consumers acknowledge that bitterness in cannabis edibles is just part of the experience; a small price to pay for the intended effect, much like alcohol or caffeine.

But trust a wizened old food scientist and highly decorated flavor maven: it doesn’t have to be that way.

Bitterness masking in edibles

Masking flavors is a relatively low-tech approach that is widely used in the edibles industry. The ultimate goal is to eliminate the natural bitterness of the plant extract by adding ingredients that cover up or block bitterness receptors on the tongue.

One such technique is called microencapsulation, where a hollow sugar molecule (cyclodextrin) attracts and contains the smaller cannabinoid molecules, and carries them past the tongue’s bitterness receptors into the stomach where the sugar dissolves and releases the THC or CBD into the bloodstream.

There are plenty of other all-natural food science compounds and ingredients for masking bitterness (including plant-based non-nutritive sweeteners, seaweed extracts, and fruit-derived essential oils) but we’ll get to that.

Using lower concentration of cannabis extract per volume

One simple way to manage bitterness is to make a bigger edible per dose. Minor adjustments in a batch’s concentration per volume can perceptibly reduce the bitterness in each edible.

Obviously this isn’t always feasible for existing cannabis products needing a flavor tune-up—it could impact packaging, labeling, regulatory registration, etc.

Plus at scale, even slight adjustments in recipe volume can affect your product costs in a big way.

Beyond balance: the future of the edibles industry

For many consumers who are new to cannabis—especially those in the “Baby Boomer” generation—edibles are the preferred method for dosing.

So this problem of bitterness in edibles has to be solved.

There are plenty of bitterness masking ingredients available—but not all of them work well for cannabis; and if they do, maybe only partially.

Finding the best one for your edibles recipe could mean expensive rounds of prototyping—and even then, with all the options available, how do you know you aren’t missing out on something that works even better?

As food scientists and chemistry nerds, we at Elevated Edibles are always searching for more effective ways to achieve the holy grail of bitterness masking for cannabis edibles.

We’ve put in countless lab hours—so you don’t have to—scientifically testing the myriad individual and combined ingredients available on the bitterness-masking market…and we’ve come up with a somewhat remarkable solution that’s all-natural, highly effective, and unique in the industry.