Westward Whiskey’s Lead Distiller Uses Sounds to Build Flavor Profiles

Anna Mantheakis, the lead distiller of technical development and innovation at Portland, Ore.-based Westward Whiskey, doesn’t have what one would say is an easy job. Her expertise, most recently in helping fine-tune the distillery’s latest sourdough American single malt offering, isn’t deployed the same way as your average whiskey distiller. Instead, she’s had to learn to hone her sensory skills to manage her lifelong synesthesia condition, in which her sense of taste is affected by her sense of hearing.

For Mantheakis, sounds can distort how things smell and taste to her. It’s not exactly a condition conducive to the type of career she’s chosen, except she has learned, through trial and error, to, as she describes it, “perceive flavor in the context of sound.”

How this works exactly reflects her journey into her current role. According to Mantheakis, those with synesthesia can go through life not perceiving anything out of the ordinary until something seriously contradicts their perception of what their senses have been telling them. In the wine/whiskey world Mantheakis entered into, that can take the form of tasting notes not being consistent, or the noise of a space affecting how something tastes.

The eventual solution for Mantheakis was to develop a series of sounds she listens to through headphones to help intentionally focus her tasting acumen. It is a process she’s constantly developing through extensive evaluation of sounds. Her sensory environment, and thus her career as a whole, has become one she’s been able to seize control of