Development and Characterization of a Check-All-That-Apply (CATA) Lexicon for Virginia Hard (Alcoholic) Ciders

Abstract

In the United States, the market for “hard” (alcoholic) ciders is growing rapidly, with over $1 billion USD in sales in 2018. These ciders present a broad range of sensory profiles, especially for small-production ciders from craft and local cideries, which represent at least 25% of the market. Unfortunately, the sensory profiles that characterize craft ciders are not well-defined in comparison to wine and beer. The cider industry and small, local craft cideries in particular could benefit from a uniform language to identify sensory attributes that are desirable (or undesirable) among their products—this study explores the feasibility and utility of one such descriptive lexicon. For lexicon development, a first group of panelists (N 1 = 28) smelled and tasted Virginia ciders (K 1 = 6) and described, in their own words, their impressions of each cider. These open-ended comments were analyzed using classical text analysis to generate 26 sensory attributes for the Check-All-That-Apply (CATA) lexicon. A second group of subjects (N 2 = 56) smelled and tasted a second set of Virginia ciders (K 2 = 6) for the CATA validation; subjects rated overall liking (9-point hedonic scale) and selected CATA attributes for each sample. Twenty-one of the CATA attributes discriminated among the samples, correspondence analysis (CA) indicated that the attributes adequately spanned the sensory space for Virginia ciders, and penalty-lift analysis revealed attributes that were associated with consumer liking. This study demonstrates that a uniform descriptive language like a CATA can be used to describe hard cider and can be linked to consumer liking.