🍯 Setting Up a Honey Tasting Panel

About this simulation

A trained sensory panel turns "this honey tastes nice" into comparable, repeatable data. This scene shows a tasting booth: a round table with a honey sample and a panel of trained tasters, plus a floating sensory wheel — six broad flavour families used to standardise how tasters describe what they perceive.

How it works

• Each honey type has a typical flavour profile across six descriptor families: floral, fruity, waxy/animal, woody/resinous, caramelised, and chemical/medicinal.
• Choosing a descriptor and dragging its intensity raises that wedge of the sensory wheel — this is exactly what a taster does on a scoring sheet, rating each descriptor 0–10.
• Panel size matters: more trained tasters scoring the same sample means outlier scores average out, raising panel agreement.
• The booth environment matters just as much as training: neutral lighting and a quiet, odour-free room stop colour and context bias from skewing scores. An uncontrolled room lowers reliability even with the same tasters and the same honey.

Controls

• Honey sample — picks the sample on the table and loads its typical flavour profile.
• Wheel descriptor — selects which of the six flavour families to edit.
• Descriptor intensity — sets that descriptor's score (0–10), reshaping the sensory wheel.
• Panel size — number of trained tasters seated at the booth.
• Booth environment — standardised neutral-light booth vs. an uncontrolled, tinted room.
• ↺ Reset scores — restores the sample's default profile. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.

Did you know?

Reference sensory wheels for honey (built on the same principle as wine and coffee wheels) let panels in different countries score the same jar using a shared vocabulary — essential for grading, blending and detecting adulteration.