20 June 2007
Tasting Beer, Tea & Chocolate
Everyone’s tastes change over time, and mine have been no different. Ten years ago I drank cider (hard cider for the Americans in the audience), drank only “ordinary” tea, and if I was inclined toward chocolate at all, preferred a sweet milk chocolate, most like Cadbury’s or thereabouts. I was only starting to distinguish between different wines, and it hadn’t really occurred to me that you could taste other differences.
I drink more beer than cider now, and even within beers, I have my favourites and preferences. A German weissbier called Erdinger has taken Dublin’s pubs by storm, and that’s one definite preference. I’ve also taken a liking to a beer called Innis & Gunn. It’s brewed in Scotland, in oak barrels that were previously used for bourbon, according to their website, and the taste is really quite notably different.
Likewise, in tea, while I’ll still drink Lyon’s Gold Label (which I think is basically oolong), I’ve taken a liking to Darjeeling, Russian Caravan tea, and even a white tea called China White Jasmine Dragon Phoenix Pearl, which we refer to in the house as Oriental Cliché Tea. And in chocolate, I now consider Green & Black’s Maya Gold to be pretty much the best thing there is.
I’m referring to that change in tastes as “maturing”, because I’m starting to see evidence that it’s not just a change in the foods available to me, but also a change in the actual sense of taste with aging. Functional Foods and Neutraceuticals has an article on taste called Sensory Deception: The Science Of Making Foods More Palatable, which explains, among other things, that “An aversion to some flavours, such as bitterness, may have a strong, evolutionarily developed component as protection against eating poisonous plants, whereas a sour taste may be warning us away from unripe or rotten fruits or fermented substances.” This aversion to bitterness manifests itself as the childish “sweet tooth”, and you can see from the examples above that most of the things I liked when I was nineteen are sweeter than the things I like now. It looks like our biology “reasons” that as we get older, we’re better able to recognise poisons and avoid them, and so it eases off on the preference for sweet over other tastes.
I’m starting to wonder, looking at that, if there’s some connection here to the “picky eater” phenomenon. We’re all familiar with it - everyone has a friend or relative who won’t eat more than a certain limited set of foods, and won’t touch anything outside it. I’m not talking about food choices like vegetarianism or vegan, but the folks who won’t eat whole types of cookery, like Indian or Thai - the tastes are outside what can be identified by them as “safe”, and so they go to “bad”. Purely anecdotally, the picky eaters I know are prone to sweet-toothedness, and further, that pickiness declines over time.
So, if current trends continue, in another few decades time, I’ll be going for black rye bread, whiskey and tobacco…
Three of my favorite things! I’ve always had a preference for dark chocolate and beer over cider, despite my fellow blogger’s recent blog post.
When I move to Dublin in the fall from NYC, I’m sure my love of whiskey will only worsen too.