In order to make a more accurate judgement of the first juniper smoke I prepared a batch of salmon with simply alder for comparison.

In this batch the sockeye was brined again in the NW clover honey and sea salt for six hours. Followed by six hours of drying. Finally it was smoked with alder chips for eight hours.

The salmon turned out very similar to the first batch and it had a similar bitterness though much more faint. The bitterness casts some doubt on my judgement of the the first batch. However I can’t rule out the influence of the juniper berries. Since the cubic inches of alder outweigh the cubic inches of juniper by a considerable amount I decided to increase the amount of juniper berries for the next batch to try to push the flavor augmentation.