Brian Cendrowski

Acquiring a Taste For Beer (or anything, for that matter)

If you were anything like me, you didn’t always like beer. The first few times I tried beer, I was repulsed. Granted, it was probably a Bud Light or Olde English 800, so that might explain it. However, I can say the same thing about coffee, asparagus and The Beatles.

How is it that things we once couldn’t stand we now enjoy? On the other hand, there may be things you loved as a kid that you wouldn’t touch now, like Spaghettios or Lucky Charms. Are these changes a physical evolution of our bodies, or is it a conscious decision we make to acquire or deacquire a particular flavor?

Acquiring taste also begs another question: Why in the world would we repeatedly subject ourselves to something we don’t like in an attempt to make ourselves like it?

Turns out, taste is a very complicated thing. As far as I have found in my research, there is no one answer that explains it all. To the best of my ability, I’ll attempt to explain some of the issues surrounding taste and our changing preferences. I’ll finish up with some tips on how you might begin to branch out into beer you may enjoy at the moment.

How Do We Taste?

I’m sure you remember from your elementary school science classes that our taste buds can sense four types of flavors: sweet, salty, sour and bitter. According to Randy Mosher in his book, Tasting Beer, researchers have recently discovered that we have receptors for two other flavors: fat and umami. Umami is a savory, meaty flavor that is often found in aged meat and cheese, fermented food and soy sauce, among others.

You have probably also heard that much of our perception of taste actually comes from our sense of smell. Research shows that 70% or more of our perception of taste comes from smell.

Our taste buds alone can only perceive those six basic flavors. It’s our sense of smell combined with our taste buds that allows us to perceive more complex flavors, such as grilled onions, oranges and peanut butter.

Instinctive Tastes

Everyone knows that kids love sweets. It’s a rare child that begs for artichoke hearts. Instinctively, we know that sweet and fatty foods are a safe source for lots of calories. (By safe, I mean it won’t kill us immediately. Excess over time is a different story, but our bodies don’t know the difference.)

Naturally, our body’s primary goal is self-preservation, and that means finding and storing energy so we won’t run the risk of starvation. We also tend to be averse to bitter flavors. In nature, bitter is often associated with dangerous or inedible.

Physical Changes

When we are born, we have taste buds along the sides and roof of our mouths, in addition to those on our tongue. That’s one reason why children are so opinionated about the food they like and don’t like. They are very sensitive to taste.

As we get older, the taste buds around our mouth are worn off, and as adults we are only left with taste buds on our tongue. In addition, our taste buds can be damaged by repeated burning by hot food, or other things such as smoking and medication.

Once we reach 50 years old, our sense of smell also begins to diminish. This causes us to begin losing our sense of taste. Food can become bland. The taste buds that detect sweet and salty begin to go first, which means that we can become much more sensitive to sour and bitter flavors than we used to be.

Aside from wear and tear, as we age hormonal and chemical changes in our body can affect how our brain interprets taste. The prime example is pregnant women. During pregnancy, the changes in a woman’s hormones can lead to craving certain food they never wanted before. For us non-pregnant people, the chemical composition of our body does change over time and can slowly, or suddenly, cause changes to how we perceive flavors.

Experience Affects Taste

Perhaps even more influential than the physical changes we undergo as we age, our perceptions, experiences and expectations have a tremendous impact on what we like to eat and drink.

I’m sure we’ve all had a few experiences where we either overindulge on an adult beverage like tequila or Captain Morgan, or perhaps you got food poisoning from fish or a hamburger, and now you gag every time you so much as smell those things. That certainly has an impact on your taste.

There are other experiential factors that can impact your taste. One is the overexposure of a particular taste for a prolonged period of time. When I was three years old, I had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches every day for like a year and I got so sick of them I didn’t eat peanut butter again until I was in college.

On the other side of overexposure, if you go without a certain flavor for a while, you can become very sensitive to it when you start eating or drinking it again. For me, it was sugar. I gave up eating desserts, candy bars, sweet cereal and drinking soda for about 9 months after college. Once I decided to allow myself some of those things again, everything was super sweet and I could barely stomach it.

Perception and Expectation

Not only do our own experiences help shape what tastes we like and don’t like, others’ opinions influence us as well. A study by Michael Siegrist and Marie-Eve Cousin was published in the February 2009 issue of Appetite magazine in which they gave 163 people different information about a wine either before or after they allowed them to taste it.

Participants that were told before tasting the wine that it received a 72 rating from a renowned expert scored the wine much lower than those who were told before tasting that the wine received a 92. It’s a perfect illustration of how your expectations influence your taste. (I’ve always wanted to take an unmarked bottle of Stone or Victory to my homebrew club to test this theory.)

Acquiring Taste

Sometimes we are able to make a conscious decision that we want to acquire a taste for something that we don’t currently like. Why in the world would anyone want to do that? My answer is that it pushes us to experience and appreciate more that the world has to offer.

If we only stuck with what we liked at the moment, we would never grow and life would be pretty boring. We would never slow down to try and understand the subtle intricacies that make something appealing. We’d take one bite, one swig, or one listen, judge it good or bad, and if it was bad we’d never come back to it.

I can think of countless albums I did not like the first time I listened to them, but after pushing through a few times I would begin to hear different instrumentation, notice changes in melody and tempo, and really begin to appreciate what the musicians were doing. Sometimes it takes a while to understand something.

I believe acquiring for something we don’t care for comes down to two things: we have to want to like it, and we have to believe we can like it. It’s basically the theory of cognitive dissonance. If we don’t like something, but we keep trying it and we believe we will like it, one of two things will happen.

Either we’ll start to like it, or we’ll stop trying it. We can’t believe one thing and do another. Our subconscious won’t allow it. In essence, you “fake it till you make it.”

Now, that’s not to say we can acquire a taste for everything. Black licorice makes me want to gag. I find it so repulsive that I can’t even smell it. Never had a bad experience with it, I just can’t stand it. I’ll never like black licorice, horseradish or olives.

Then again, do I not like those because I don’t believe I can? Oh man, I think my head may explode…

How Do I Help Other People Acquire a Taste For Beer?

First, realize you can’t make everyone like beer, no matter how passionate or skilled you are. Some people need more time to grow into it, others may never develop a taste.

There are a few things you can try to help people who say they “don’t like beer.”

1. Be patient and don’t haze someone for not drinking an entire pint of something they don’t like. I offer a “money back guarantee” on all my recommendations, offering to drink the beer if they don’t like it. People are more likely to experiment if they don’t have to risk a whole $5.
2. Ask questions to find common flavors between certain beer styles and what they like in other food and drink. Do they like wine? If so, what kind? Do they drink coffee? What kind of candy do they like? Are they chocoholics? Do they like oranges, grapefruit or other fruits? Do they like dried fruit, such as raisins, plums or cherries?
3. If someone you are with orders a “standard” beer, speak up and suggest something similar, but that you feel is a little better tasting or more sophisticated. Encourage them to branch out.
4. When all else fails, go negative. Say things like, “I think this beer is awesome, but I don’t think you’d like it.” Subconsciously, most people will think to themselves, “Why wouldn’t I like it, too? I like good things. I have taste!” They’ll order it and probably like it just because you said they wouldn’t. It’s sneaky, but effective.

There is no one answer to why you used to like basil but it now makes you queasy. The human mind and senses are too complicated for generalized answers.

My advice is simple. Try new things. Slow down and attempt to discover nuances you never noticed before. If you haven’t had something you don’t like in a while, try it again. You never know if the switch in your brain has been flipped.

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