Electronic tongue distinguishes between top shelf and rip-offs

Lost Alcohol/ Ben Heine www.benheine.com

St. Petersburg, Russia chemists develop specialized electronic tongues on a case-by-case basis

When South African manufacturers wanted to stave off knockoffs of their high quality brandies, they turned to a team of Russian chemists with some experience in the area. St. Petersburg State University researchers have developed electronic tongues and noses on a case-by-case basis for several multinationals. (The concept of the electronic tongue isn’t new, researchers at UT-Austin had a working prototype in 1998.) 

The chemists trained the device (consisting of several sensors, hardware and software), to differentiate between different varieties of brandy and cognac – the “young unseasoned drink” and the seasoned one.

While both brandy and cognac are aged in oak casks after distillation, the seasoned brandy contains tannin, which fundamentally changes the drink’s chemical composition, according to the chemists.  The device was also taught to distinguish between brandies produced in a laboratory and those made in a typical industrial process. Concerning the latter test, the researchers said the device made accurate hits 3 out of 4 times. “Coopers also make mistakes,” the researchers stated unapologetically. 

“It is not the first time that we worked with brandy,” Andrey Legin, the chemist in charge of the project at St. Petersburg State University, said in a statement. “Prior to the South African Republic we dealt with, for example, the French from the famous town of Cognac (Martell, Remy Martin), so we worked with cognacs...In general, we have worked a lot with wines. Besides France and the South African Republic, we dealt with Italy, Portugal, New Zealand, Australia.” 

The team has published more than 50 papers relating to electronic noses and tongues. Other applications for the electronic tongue as outlined on the teams’ website: 

• Analysis of many types of food and beverages and food additives
• Recognition, identification, classification and quality control
• Determination of content of inorganic and organic nutrients
• Correlation between electronic tongue and human sensory perception in food flavor evaluation
• Basic tastes (salty, sweet, bitter, sour, umami)
• Prediction of human taste panel scores

Clients include Proctor and Gamble for “recognition and evaluation of coffee,” Pepsico for “taste evaluation of soft drinks,” and GlaxoSmithKline for “flavour evaluation, masking effect assessment of new chemical entities and drugs.”  

(Go here for a look at the electronic tongue, or ET for short.)