Mouthfeel: What It Is and How It Impacts the Sensory Experience for the Beverage Consumer

In the world of food and beverage, the consumer’s sensory experience consuming a product can be “make or break” for a company trying to develop brand loyalty and attract a repeat customer. The sensory experience involves the following: touch, sight, smell, and taste. When it comes to drinking and evaluating a beverage, a consumer’s first tactile and visual interaction will be with the packaging. Then, once the beverage is opened and sipped, the consumer will not only think about the product’s flavors; they will also consider its effervescence, its weight and its texture, qualities otherwise known as mouthfeel.   

Beverage producers need to carefully consider how these three elements – flavor, effervescence, and mouthfeel – impact each other and the consumer’s experience. 

What is Mouthfeel?  

Mouthfeel is best defined as the physical sensations we experience in our mouth when we ingest a food item or beverage. Mouthfeel is distinctly different from taste, because taste connects to flavor. Mouthfeel is definitely impacted by the beverage’s texture – the tactile experience the consumer has when the surface of the drink meets their lips, tongue and mouth.

When describing the Mouthfeel of fermented beverages like beer, wine or cider, these are some of the qualities or attributes that consumers might consider:  

• Chewiness: the sensation of resistance in the beverage 
• Cohesiveness: how the beverage holds together 
• Thickness: the weight of the beverage in mouth (this also impacts the force needed to draw the beverage from the glass into the mouth over the tongue)
• Dryness: the experience of dryness in mouth
• Heaviness: the weight of the beverage on tongue 
• Creaminess: the soft, smooth, rich texture of the beverage

Beers that lack fullness are often described as thin, while full-bodied beers are described as round. Other words that can be used to describe beverages when evaluating mouthfeel are watery, delicate, light, smooth, silky, buttery, creamy, milky, rich, full, thick, dense, heavy, dry, and rough. With beer, factors that impact mouthfeel include serving temperature, pH, carbonation, alcohol level, and texture.   

How Mouthfeel Impacts the Consumer’s Sensory Experience 

While flavor and aroma are an important part of a consumer’s experience drinking a beverage, mouthfeel and texture play a significant role as well. Much of this has to do with what the consumer expects the beverage to taste and feel like, versus what they actually experience when the drink enters their mouth. For example, consider what happens when a consumer chooses to “water down” a beverage by either adding tap or sparkling water to it or by pouring it over ice. In the case of a spirit, this not only alters the beverage’s potency, but also the sensory experience in terms of the strength of the flavor and the mouthfeel. When it comes to beer, each style will have its own unique mouthfeel, just as their flavors and aromas will be unique as well.  

For consumers of beer and other fermented beverages, mouthfeel is an important part of the experience, because most come to the table expecting their drink to taste and feel a certain way.  If someone chooses a porter at their local pub and finds the mouthfeel to be thin, they might be disappointed, compared to the person who chooses a lager knowing that the mouthfeel will be lighter than other beers. The challenge for producers trying to meet the expectations of the consumer is matching the beverage’s mouthfeel to the overall flavor profile and composition. 

Emulsion Technology: The Perfect Solution for Enhancing and Improving Mouthfeel 

For a brewer who wants to give a light or medium-bodied beverage a stable, fuller body and richer sensory experience, a hop-derived, water-soluble emulsion can provide the perfect solution for adjusting the mouthfeel. SōRSE has applied its emulsion technology to hops for seamless integration into all beer, NA beer, and cider products.

SōRSE’s Mouthfeel product gives a beverage producer the ability to reach the desired mouthfeel with a single one-step ingredient, which allows them to focus on fermentability.  SōRSE’s single step, “drop and go” solution is easy to integrate into production; it is perfect for cold-side addition post filtration, and no additional equipment or processing is needed. Replacing traditional methods for improving mouthfeel such as adding oats or lactose with the Mouthfeel emulsion will improve total yields due to the reduction of vegetive materials. Mouthfeel is TTB-approved, label friendly, and is stable beyond the shelf-life of the beer.

If you’re a product developer and are interested in how our Mouthfeel product could improve or enhance the body of your beverage, come to the SōRSE and request a sample today.