The Complexity Of Tasting ? How Many Factors Interact When We Taste A Beer

French author Philippe Delerm includes the first sip of beer into life small pleasures: "first sip…. is the only one that counts. The others, longer and longer, more and more insignificant, only give a warm heavier, a wasted abundance….(first sip) begins well before it has been swallowed up. Already on the lips a sparkling gold, cool amplified by foam, then slowly on the palate happiness is tinged with bitterness". About a century after the famous Proust madeleine, whose flavour had opened the mind of the author to an entire world of remembrances, this is a very good example of what we now would say influence of expectations on tasting or individual sensorial experience. 

Although more than a century has past from the Proust madeleine and extensive researches have been made in the last decades, science is not able yet to fully explain what it happens in the brain when we taste a food or a drink and like or dislike it. Experiments have confirmed that the flavour is a complex sensation and is not just related to the sense of taste. Using an illustrative word, we could say that the experience of tasting is "stereoscopic": I mean that it is not just related to taste, but also to the other senses as the smell and the sight, and that all these senses cooperate to supply us the whole sensation we experience when eating a food or drinking a beverage. All of us know that drinking beer is not just "drinking", but also assessment of the colour and the smell. But the fact is: what we see can affect the smell and what we smell can affect the taste. In an experiment conducted in 2001, fifty French students of the oenology department of Bordeaux University were asked to describe the odor of two red wines, one of these being a white wine coloured red. They described the coloured red wine as a typical red wine, using terms always related to red colour, while the same wine served at its natural colour was described by terms recalling the clear colour of a white wine.

 Interaction between smell, colour and taste and the effect of external factors as the temperature explain only in part the complexity of tasting. For a complete picture, we have to take into account what we can call "external information" and "cultural environment". Psychiatric and Behavorial scientists are studying with a growing interest the influence that prior information has on consumer behavior. We could take fun of many experiments conducted on wine expert tasters. In one of these, wine professionals were given three glasses of the same wine, but told the wines were priced differently. The experts preferred the wine they believed most expensive. None of them guessed that all three glasses held the same wine.

 Another recent experiment was about the suggestion on tasters of an authoritative opinion. The tasters were divided into groups and asked to rate an Argentinean wine which had received a high score (92 on a scale of 100) by the wine guru Robert Parker. The groups which were given this information before tasting, rated the wine sensibly more than the groups that were not given. 

Samuel McClure, Jian Li and other scientists of Huston University, studied the brain areas involved in tasting process and the way that previous information and cultural messages can influence the consumer preferences. They based the experiment on two nearly identical drinks as Coke and Pepsi. When a set of the glasses were labelled as Coke, subjects showed an outstanding preference for labelled glasses, while there was no significant difference between the two beverages in blind tests. The most interesting aspect of the experiment is that scientists traced the activity of particular areas of the brain (hippocampus/DLPFC/midbrain) involved in tasting process when cultural information (in this case: brand knowledge) is present. Researchers suggestion is that these areas and the area deputed to evaluate sensory information (VMPFC) work separately and may bias one the preferences of the others. 

The stimulus of cultural information on certain brain areas concurring to form the final evaluation may in part explain why there are so many differences in consumer preferences, and also why they use to change along the years. Our taste is hence a part of our culture and also, probably, of our character. When I have lunch with friends or colleagues, I like to observe their choices and to hear their comments on the food (yes, if they discover this, I will have to eat alone for the rest of my live!). I often noticed what I think to be correspondences between their preferences and some aspects of their character. For example, a friend of mine who has strong logical abilities is very sensitive to any little variation in cooking time of pasta, which I find not so relevant. I know this can not be seriously defined "scientific method", but I find that correspondence between some personal attitudes and food preferences could be an interesting area to study. 

The fact that cultural environment can affect consumer taste is surely significant, because it means that on the pressure of sufficient strong messages we could move, for example, to a different diet, which may be more consistent or not, it depends on how good is the message for us. But it also means that it could be very difficult to change preferences shaped on deep cultural model or, worst, imbedded into our character. 

The conclusion for a beer lover is there is hope that nearly everyone can be educated to beer appreciation. And nearly everyone can take its own steps on the paths of the innumerable beer styles. Moreover, as we saw, there are so many factors influencing the tasting, that we can say, with Heraclitus, that you will never drink the same beer twice. Really.