The Science and Poetry of Beer Flavor

I’ve been thinking about flavor and our ability to taste lately. Can we just go ahead and call it a superpower?

I'll explain.

Flavor is the combination of taste, aroma, and mouthfeel. We can taste Sweet, Salty, Sour, Bitter, and Umami (aka savory). Researchers are currently investigating whether we can taste more. Despite tasting five things, we can smell thousands. When it comes to mouthfeel, we are adept at identifying, quantifying, and qualifying things like body, carbonation, astringency, texture, and ?chemesthetic? sensations (these include alcohol warming, spicy heat, and menthol cooling).

Flavor research is still nascent because stuffy scientists from 100 years ago considered it beneath them. Those same scientists brought us the tongue map we learned as kids. Not only have we learned the tongue map was completely wrong, but flavor is more complex than we thought, and we are much better at it than we thought.

(If you want to learn more, listen to what one of these flavor researchers has to say on Good Beer Matters GBM 76 with Dr. Courtney Wilson)

Survival

One thing we’ve learned is that our ability to taste is a survival mechanism. The reason why we don’t inherently like bitterness is because it warns us again poison. We love sugar because it’s an efficient energy source, à la minimum effort and maximum gain. We also have taste buds in some very strange parts of our bodies. The thought here is that if some compound bypassed our palate by beer bonging at a party, the body could detect it elsewhere, send messages to the stomach which would then act as a bouncer and kick everyone out.

Time Travel

Did you ever see the Pixar Movie, “Ratatouille”? Remember the scene where the villainous food critic, Anton Ego, took one bite of the titular dish and instantly reverted back to his childhood? This happens to me all the time. I’ll taste a beer and suddenly I’m eating cereal before school, or getting candy from my grandfather, or sitting at the beach in college. These are flavor memories and beer flavors are full of them.

Teleportation

The first time I ordered a drink at a bar I was 11 years old ordering a shandy (half beer, half lemon soda) at a pub in England. It was both legal and normal for children to drink these. Every time I have a Shandy, I take a quick trip to England. Musty off flavors take me to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. A Helles and a Bratwurst send me to Munich. These are locational flavor memories. Get the idea?

Master Key

I used to watch the show Top Chef and one episode was particularly memorable. A chef created a dessert that combined white chocolate and wasabi. The judges were blown away by this unintuitive fusion of flavors, texture and chemesthetic effect. The point is that flavor can work as a master key to unlock worlds and experiences we haven’t even considered yet.

I know sometimes we all just want to drink our beer. Me too. But, tasting our beer offers more interesting experiences if we’re open to them. This is why I do what I do. We should all be so lucky to travel back in time or take a $5 trip to Europe. It’s all there, waiting for you, right there in your glass.

Your Brother in Beer,

Jeremy

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