Comments on: The more you know, the better it tastes

By: onotoman

onotoman — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 07:37:01 +0000

I wonder if it turns up in tea, will this whole practice include knowing where the particular silver tea set we are drinking from is made etc. I feel that such things take the fun out of enjoying a drink because you will often find yourself unimpressed and unable to enjoy drinking it just because it is not of a particular origin. But if you actually opened your mind, you would find that sometimes what others think is not good might just be your cup of tea, no pun intended!
http://www.acsilver.co.uk/shop/pc/Four-P iece-Tea-Coffee-Sets-Services-c97.htm

By: associatesmind

associatesmind — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 12:25:35 +0000

Haha. Well said wcw.

By: derino

derino — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 14:19:11 +0000

This inevitably makes me think of Danny intoning to Withnail: “this grass is the finest in the Western hemisphere. It’s grown at exactly 2,000 feet above sea level. I have it flown in from my man in Mexico. His name’s Juan”. Clearly also a man decades ahead of his time.

By: wcw

wcw — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 19:08:47 +0000

Funny thing, when you again mentioned the truism that ‘[t]he more you know about your beverage, the better it tastes,’ it finally clicked for me: that’s not how taste (for coffee, or wine, or music, or anything) works for me. The best possible experience for me is discovery: tasting something new and discovering it is delicious. My urge to learn about origins follows discovery. Details still matter. In the initial purchasing decision, they serve as proxies to improve my chances. Thereafter, they’re a pleasure in their own right: so this is how they do it. Yum.

To take this from the personal to the general, I’d suggest that there is indeed a discovery-seeking population adhering to any art form. They’re among the kids you see in the dingy rock clubs or puttering through wine shop discount racks asking about unfamiliar bottles. There are a whole lot more kids jumping up and down at big pop shows or ponying up for a bottle of Dom or Krug, and I want to take nothing away from those experiences. But I think maybe there’s room for a halfway backlash to this analysis of tastes.

Full disclosure: I like coffee. I would happily try cat-excreted beans given the opportunity, but then I enjoy things like bee vomit mixed into bacteria-infested milk (aka honey in yogurt). If something is good, it’s good.

By: MarshalN

MarshalN — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:28:28 +0000

And hsvkitty — polyphenols, IMO, is just another story to tell to sell you stuff. If you don’t like the taste/smell, you shouldn’t be drinking it.

By: MarshalN

MarshalN — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:26:55 +0000

Actually, there is also bug-excrement tea. It's actually not that bad.

By: hsvkitty

hsvkitty — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:44:02 +0000

Thank you Bryan x, that laugh went well with my morning coffee… made from freshly ground beans of my own unique blend of premium mountain beans; the aroma alone would make a coffee aficionado salivate to taste!

And of course if you have not taken the quiz at http://coffeeuniverse.com/ then you have no business even commenting … Vile tea drinker!

(I drink it for the polyphenals and so drink it black and strong. The casein in dairy products bind to the polyphenols and render them less available. And I drink copious amounts of green tea for the same reason. I do love the aroma more then the taste.)

Isn’t the brain an incredible thing? I imagine that same part of the brain is responsible for the decision making that makes some stocks irresistable … the medial prefrontal cortex.

This post might have some links to your last post, whereby buying something is not necessarily a need or even want, but you choose it because you identify with it.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl e.cfm?id=neuromarketing-brain

By: bryanX

bryanX — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 13:11:00 +0000

We can be convinced to eat crap-on-a-stick. And also demand it and pay top dollar. People do exactly that for coffee made from beans that have emerged from a "monkey cats" anus.

By: MarshalN

MarshalN — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:37:59 +0000

It already exists in tea, just not as much in the Western world.

By: Curmudgeon

Curmudgeon — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:24:13 +0000

I confess that I’ve never understood our addiction to coffee (I’ve never tasted it; the smell is repugnant to me). But this sort of thing just seems to take that addiction to the height of absurdity.

By: fxtrader14

fxtrader14 — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 11:01:32 +0000

Try chocolate. Valhrona has been selling “vintage” squares for years – all with origin & narrative etc…

By: fresnodan

fresnodan — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:07:38 +0000

With regard to Simon’s astute observation, I would imagine a well crafted story would raise the price of the coffee.
I would also imagine that not 1 in a hundred can reliably distinguish between an African and South American coffee.

By: SimonMorris

SimonMorris — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 07:56:00 +0000

As a thought experiment, would these unique narratives be any less “important and valuable” if they were entirely fictional?