Serving order in a tasting

Sweetness is the most disruptive carry-over and the shortest lived. A sweet cider leaves a residue of sugar on the tongue and, more importantly, resets the reference point against which the next sample is judged. A dry cider tasted immediately after a sweet one reads as sour and thin. Rinsing with water and waiting a minute largely removes it.

Tannin is the most persistent. Astringency is a tactile sensation produced by procyanidins binding salivary proteins, and the mouth needs time to replenish the saliva that was precipitated. A markedly tannic cider can leave the palate drier for five minutes or more, and it makes a subsequent low-tannin cider seem watery and slack.

Acidity accumulates. Successive acidic samples raise the threshold at which acid is noticed, so the fourth high-acid cider in a row tastes less sharp than the first, and a moderately acidic cider tasted afterwards can read as flabby.

Aroma adapts quickly and recovers quickly. Olfactory receptors reduce their response to a continuously present compound within a minute or two, which is why the third sniff of a glass tells you less than the first. This is adaptation rather than fatigue, and stepping away from the glass restores it.

Alcohol has a cumulative effect that is not perceptual at all: it impairs the judgement doing the assessing. This is the reason strength is a variable in the ordering and the reason for spitting in any tasting of more than a few samples.

Real flights rarely offer a single clean gradient. A dry, high-tannin cider and a sweet, low-tannin one cannot both go first, and which variable should govern depends on what the tasting is for. If the purpose is to compare tannin structure, order by tannin and accept that the sweetness gradient will be untidy. If the purpose is to establish house style across a producer’s range, order by sweetness.

Perry complicates the picture, because sorbitol gives many perries a residual sweetness that cider of equivalent dryness does not have. A "dry" perry can carry over into a dry cider like a medium one. Grouping perries together rather than interleaving them with ciders is usually cleaner.

Ice cider, pommeau and other concentrated styles belong at the end regardless of any other consideration. Their sugar and alcohol concentrations are high enough that nothing tasted afterwards is being assessed fairly.

The first sample in any flight is systematically advantaged or disadvantaged relative to the rest, because it is the only one tasted on a neutral palate. Formal sensory panels deal with this by randomising presentation order across tasters, so that order effects are distributed rather than concentrated on one product.

For an informal tasting the cheap version is to retaste. Once every sample has been through once, going back to the first one — now on a palate that has met all the others — routinely changes the assessment, and the change is itself information.

Where a decision matters, tasting blind removes the largest single distortion, which is not order but expectation. Knowing which cider is which changes what is perceived, reliably and in a direction that flatters the more expensive bottle.