Sensory methodologies and the taste of water

Abstract : Describing the taste of water is a challenge since drinking water is supposed to have almost no taste. In this study, different classical sensory methodologies have been applied in order to assess sensory characteristics of water and have been compared: sensory profiling, Temporal Dominance of Sensations and free sorting task. These methodologies present drawbacks: sensory profile and TDS do not provide an effective discrimination of the taste of water and the free sorting task is efficient but does not enable data aggregation. A new methodology based on comparison with a set of references and named “Polarized Sensory Positioning” (PSP) has been developed enabling to easily define the sensory characteristics of water without presenting too many samples. Finally, this method provides a new type of sensory data requesting dedicated data analysis.