# Sensory Panel Performance Evaluation--Comprehensive Review of Practical Approaches
## 3 Panelist Selection, Monitoring and Product-Specific Tests
Some papers give the impression to the readers that such individuals who work at a university department for a long time are also called experts. This might be true when referring to their field of research, but to be a sensory expert requires a demonstrated sensitivity and the ability to perceive product attributes and describe samples. In several cases, the label 'expert' is applied to balance the relatively low number of sensory panelists. An expert panelist can be a product expert (typical company panelist, who is very familiar with the product) or a method expert (who is frequently involved in sensory-method-specific tests). Another critical point is the type of questions answered by expert tests. The reader might be sadly too familiar with the phenomenon that a small panel of expert panelists is measuring attributes, e.g., appearance, odor, texture, etc. but they use a hedonic type of scale. There is a noticeable dominance of applying expert panelists in some fields of food and beverage technology. These are usually products with a high hedonic value, thus requiring rigorous measurements and grading the sensory attributes of the products. Due to the long history of systematic sensory testing, these products have a specific sensory language, usually summarized in the form of flavor wheels. These complex classification systems of descriptors require well-established training programs for those specific food and beverage types. In case of these product-specific tests there are relevant and generally accepted terms, techniques and organizations which are specific to the given type of food or beverage. In particular, the wine, beer and spirits industries have strong traditions in creating schemes for selecting, training and monitoring the assessors. In the wine sector, the International Organization of Vine and Wine (OIV) is one of the major bodies of providing guidelines for those who organize wine competitions. It is a general observation that product competitions have a higher importance in the mind of the general sensory practitioners than the routine, QC type of test, or even the R&D sessions. OIV created a freely accessible sensory guide, which is strongly based on the ISO documents listed in the reference section. One of the recommendations is the pre-testing of wine panelists with the triangle test [21]. Participants receive three samples, where two samples are identical, and the third is different. The magnitude of the difference is usually low in order to test the perception and the practical experience of the tasters. The beer industries use different guidelines, depending on their size and structure. Large breweries very often utilize the protocols of the European Brewery Convention (EBC). The Analytica EBC is a series of manuals, which describe a part of the beer QC system, in order to help stakeholders to better identify the critical points and aspects of a given part of brewing. To be a member of EBC is a voluntary decision, and Analytica guides can be purchased by anyone, not only EBC members. Currently, there are 15 documents available at the sensory section, and only one deals with the selection and training of assessors. Many documents were published more than twenty years ago; this might refer to the fact, that large breweries also utilize ISO or ASTM standards beside EBC guides, thus this community is not overly motivated to develop and update these guidelines. Another beer-related scheme is the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP), which was founded in the USA in 1985. Their assessor training and evaluation program is mainly focusing on the knowledge of beer styles and the description of samples. One part of the protocol is the detection of possible faults in beers. Generally, there are a list of negative (faulty) descriptors on the scoresheet, which should be marked according to the problems detected. However, some experts argue that this technique might trigger an attitude in the panelists looking for faults.