Genuine sensory experts: Five water sommeliers at Krones

Beer, wine, whisk(e)y – tastings have become quite popular for alcoholic beverages. But have you ever taken part in a water tasting? Almost certainly not, because most people pay little or no attention to the mineral water they are drinking.

However, we’re actually doing water an injustice because it does in fact have many facets: “Its taste changes depending on its mineral composition. A lot of calcium gives you a furred tongue, magnesium tastes sweetish in weak concentrations but bitter in high concentrations, and the trace element silicate makes for a full-bodied taste experience,” explains Jörg Berger, who is in charge of the sales team for water treatment systems. And he knows exactly what he’s talking about because the graduate chemical engineer, in addition to the usual tasks entailed by his job, also functions as a water sommelier. He is one of five working for Krones who completed his training at the Doemens Academy in March 2022 together with his two sales colleagues Martin Rominger and Maximilian Keil, and with Florian Köglmeier from Process Technology and Maximilian Frammelsberger from KIC Krones.

Wanted: Special instinct for sensory nuances

The requisite two-week course at the Doemens Academy is unique worldwide because there is probably no other training programme of comparable length that goes into such detail or offers such exacting tasting training sessions. The course was most definitely in a class of its own, especially the practical part of it: “We started by training our taste buds to detect tastes like salty, bitter, sweet and sour. We then put what we had just learned to good use on various mineral waters, identifying their constituents,” says Maximilian Frammelsberger. “Both theoretically and practically, we were taught all about the minerals and salts found in water, and how they affect its taste.”

In retrospect, the course proved highly intensive and was extremely demanding. To quote Jörg Berger: “To be honest, when we started I found it hard to imagine that we’d be able to take a comprehensive exam after just two short weeks. But an incessant stream of tastings, in which we sampled the most varied range of mineral waters, and the in-depth explanations given by our lecturer which were based on sound scientific data helped us understand it all. We soon found ourselves detecting even the tiniest taste differences, describing them and internalising the effects that individual minerals and trace elements have on a water’s taste and our perception of it.”

The exam combined theory – a water’s numerous ingredients and their nutritionally important aspects – and practice: In several tasting sessions, the participants had to identify minerals like magnesium, calcium, etc. in the water they drank. But that was not all. They also had to detect certain mineral compositions and assign them to individual mineral waters. Waters with different carbonation levels were also part of the exam. The participants had to line them up in the correct sequence in a blind tasting. “Yet another task was to draw up a water list, similar to a wine list you get in restaurants. Based on various mineral water brands, we described their mineral content, origin or taste, and gave appropriate recommendations,” says Maximilian Frammelsberger.