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Styrene (Plastics) FLAVOUR STANDARD
The Styrene Flavour Standard helps train professional tasters to recognise the potency of plastics’ character in beverages. Plastic off notes can occur in almost any beverage – when raw materials or finished products interact with plastic during the production or packaging. The threshold for styrene in beer is 20 µg / l.
This off-flavour can be from plastic pipework, carbonation lines, dispensing lines, packaging, slip agents, and can linings. The styrene flavour standard ensures tasters can accurately detect and assess this attribute.
We ship globally – shipping costs may apply depending on your region
Minimum Order: £275
Sensory Terms
The presence of styrene in beverages is often associated with sensory descriptors such as:
– Styrene
– Plastic
– Polystyrene packaging
– Burning plastic
– Melted plastic
FlavorActiV Sensory Icon: PET plastic bottle
Cause of Styrene Off-Flavour
Plastic off-notes can occur in almost any beverage when raw materials or finished products interact with plastic during production or packaging. These off-notes can result from using plastic materials in production equipment, such as plastic pipework, carbonation lines, dispensing lines, packaging, slip agents, and can linings.
Wild yeasts can also produce plastic-like flavours by contaminating raw materials and finished products.
Generally, plastic off flavours have a low incidence due to improvements in plastic quality and consumer awareness of products.
The Styrene flavour standard is crucial for sensory training in various beverage industries, including:
Beer: It helps detect and control unwanted plastic off-notes that may result from interactions with packaging or equipment.
Soft Drinks: These allow for identifying and mitigating undesirable plastic flavours that can emerge during production or storage.
Incorporating the Styrene (Plastics) Flavour Standard into your sensory training program enhances the ability to recognise and manage undesirable plastic-like notes, thereby improving product quality and consistency.
Other Information
Beer Flavour Wheel Number: 0121
Typical concentration seen: Taint, not detected in normal beverages.
Recommended flavour standard / sensory reference standard of: American Society of Brewing Chemists (ASBC) and the European Brewing Chemists (EBC)
Please note that this is one of several styrene (plastic) flavour standards we have, and more are available upon request.
FlavorActiV GMP Flavour Standards
Only Pharmaceutical Quality GMP Flavour Standards provide sufficient quality for professional sensory panels to train and validate with.
We produce encapsulated GMP (Pharmaceutical Good Manufacturing Practice) Flavour Standards that are safe to both smell and drink. The compounds within our capsules impart the aroma, taste and mouthfeel of a specific defect or positive flavour into a beverage for the purposes of taster training, calibration and quality control.
Our individual flavour GMP Flavour Standards are sold by flavour, each flavour pack contains 5 capsules, each separately blister packaged. Our sensory kits contain a mixture of flavours, each separately blister packaged, read the product description for flavour details.
We ship globally, and have over 20 years of experience at it. Our GMP Pharmaceutical Flavour Standards are produced to the highest standards, and as such, their shelf-life is strong and their quality consistent.
FlavorActiV’s flavour centre is the world’s only pharmaceutically run facility dedicated to the production of flavour reference standards. The Flavour Centre is a state-of-the-art facility housed within the campus of world-renowned Quay Pharma near Liverpool in the U.K.
The Flavour Centre was designed by FlavorActiV from the ground up at the direct request of global customers as they looked to move away from inferior food grade ‘certified flavour standards’ to GMP Pharma, a standard that ensures safe, stable, traceable, consistent and long shelf-life products.
All FlavorActiV’s industry-leading encapsulated flavour standards are manufactured following GMP at our Flavour Centre. All aspects of manufacture are overseen by Quay Pharma who are audited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.K. Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory agency (MHRA). We also welcome customer audits.
Only FlavorActiV GMP flavour standard capsules bear our mark of authenticity.
We brand each of our capsules so that our customers know they’re getting the Pharmaceutical GMP Quality that only FlavorActiV provide.
Industry leading packaging and shelf-life
FlavorActiV flavour standards are blister packaged, which extends shelf-life and protects capsules from potential contamination. The average shelf-life of FlavorActiV flavour standards is 18 months to 4 years, depending on the flavour compounds.
We will never ship in pots or plastic packaging, here’s why…
Blister packaging protects capsules from the environment until they are ready for use. Blister packaging greatly reduces the amount of headspace for possible flavour escape. As each capsule individually blister packaged, making use of one capsule still leaves all others protected. FlavorActiV Flavour Standard packaging is 100% recyclable, as opposed to polypropylene which is not widely recycled.
Pots are semi-porous, they allow molecules to pass through and flavour to be lost, their significant headspace also adds to substantial flavour escape as a gas, even when using just one capsule all those remaining in the pot are exposed.
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