Part of the Flavor and Sensory school. Class 1 of 6.
The capability: you can identify the four balance axes separately in a finished drink.
Prerequisites: Modules 11, 12.
The practice
Make four solutions — sweet, sour, bitter, and saline — at low concentrations, and taste each alone.
Then combine them in pairs and notice what each does to the other: sugar suppresses perceived acid, acid suppresses perceived sweetness, salt suppresses bitterness and amplifies sweetness.
Then taste a finished drink and name which axis is doing what.
Then take a drink that is off and name the axis before correcting it.
The reference
The single-axis solutions, which are the calibration standards.
What you are building
The ability to decompose. Most people can tell that a drink is unbalanced and cannot say on which axis — which means their correction is a guess with a fifty percent success rate.
And the specific discrimination that saves the most drinks: flat that salt does not fix is almost always acid, per Module 12 — and the split sample is how you find out rather than guess.
Verification and boundary
Present four drinks each off on one axis. Name each.
Boundary: none specific.