Almost any flavour can taste good once. Give a flavour house a decent brief and you will get something back that impresses the first time you open it. That part is not hard.

What is hard is week three.

Flavour fatigue

Your nose and mouth adapt to whatever you put in front of them. Use the same aroma all day, every day, and the parts of it that stood out on Monday stop registering by Friday. By the second week you are getting the shape of the flavour without much of the detail. By the third you are going through the motions and quietly browsing for something else.

Anyone who has stuck with one flavour for a month knows the feeling. Very few brands design around it, because the flavour is usually signed off in a tasting session that lasts an afternoon.

What we do instead

Every candidate gets used properly for at least three weeks before it can go on sale. Normal days, morning to night, alongside everything else we are eating and drinking. No tasting notes, no scoring sheet. Just: are we still reaching for it.

Plenty do not survive that. Some go flat. Some get sweet and cloying. One dessert profile we had was genuinely excellent for ten minutes and completely unbearable by the end of the day.

Those go back for another round or get dropped. It is slow, and it is the reason we are launching with three rather than everything we have made.

What you get out of it

A bottle you finish. Not one you get halfway through and abandon in a drawer.

That is the whole thing we are selling. Everything else, the small batches, the local blending, the packaging, is just doing the job properly. The flavour lasting is the part we are actually proud of.