No knock against your info, Steve. I was just at a loss (on the part of the post that I reacted to initially) that using the term flavor was bogus. I get the concept he was getting at, but for our purposes in beer recipes, they keep flavor and aroma as distinct components. All good. It’s Friday. Always good !
This is about dead on to what the guy said. Flavor is how the brain interprets taste and odor.
this topic is intriguing to me…always has been before I even thought of brewing. You can do some very cool at home experiments on yourself. deprive one sense like smell, taste something and note. then add smell back in and note the difference. We even use sight along with sensory memory-what we remember about somethings smell and taste . Just think about when you looked at a picture of a steak, a strawberry, or other and you swear you could taste and smell it…that’s sensory memory at work.
Taste is what you sense with your taste buds: salt, sugar, acid, bitterness, umami. As far as taste is concerned, hops only affect the bitterness receptors. Aroma is what you sense with your olfactory bulb inside your nose, whether it gets there via your nostrils or around the back of the soft palate while food/drink is in your mouth.
How you define flavor is up to you - maybe some combination of taste and aroma that is experienced only when something is in the mouth, perhaps. That’s fine, but it’s still just a combination of taste and aroma, so there isn’t any scientific logic in splitting hop additions into taste (start of boil), flavor (middle of boil) and aroma (end of boil (aroma). That’s not to say the mid boil addition is pointless - it might well be doing something. But it’s very misleading to describe flavor as equivalent to taste and aroma.
Personally I think of flavour as aroma alone. Mint flavour, orange flavour, strawberry flavour… these are all compounds detected inside the nose. I would never describe something as salt-flavoured, acid-flavoured or bitterness flavoured.
We love rabbit trails, thats for sure. Not sure its nailing down what the OP asked, but it kills time in a fun way.
I don’t disagree from a scientific standpoint. The fact that the link between taste and aroma is so strong in what we perceive when we eat or drink something has a lot to do with why there is very little real quantified info on the subject of hop flavor/aroma. So we all experiment and find out what we like. Regardless of terminology, some beers have varying levels of hop bitterness, flavor(taste), and aroma. ‘Flavor’ just seems to speak a common language in hopping beers anyway.
We probably could say that we don’t taste anything in our mouth or smell anything in our nose, it all happens in our brain.
No doubt. Definitely starts there.
To go further down your rabbit trail, this is equally true of vision. Colours don’t exist in the real world, for instance, they’re just illusory sensations our brains arbitrarily assign to particular ranges of wavelengths. A lot of the time the relevant wavelength isn’t even there - eg yellow on a TV screen is not made by yellow light. And some colours don’t exist in the electromagnetic spectrum at all, eg magenta, which is what our brains came up with by inventing a colour that sits between both ends of the visible spectrum to form a totally fictitious loop.
To return to the OP, I would say omit flavour additions and use the hops just for aroma (assuming bittering is at the right level) - the later the better, some in the steep and some as dry hops.
“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
Correctamundo! I can come up with a new dish that I have fun making and eat it while having a great time with dear friends. I could write everything down, measuring to the milligram and use the same exact ingredients, times, methods etc. and I could never make that dish taste the same again. You could have your first IPA on a date while falling in love or you could be drinking your first IPA when you find out that a loved one died. You’ll have drastically different perceptions of the flavor of hops based on subconscious associations.
Things I love about beer #17:
Every conversation about beer will devolve into a philosophy debate if given enough time.
Carry on…
By “time” do you mean our linear concept of time or the whole time-space continuum?
This was one of the most brutally-challenging pop-sci books I’ve ever read, but immensely interesting. I might have to re-read it soon:
http://www.amazon.com/Times-Arrow-Archimedes-Point-Directions/dp/0195117980
Right. I prefer Dr Who time.
One night at Russian River I had a Pliny, it was dumbed down, I could only get bitter. Mrs. R said it just like always. I didn’t realize a sinus infection had begun, but I did the next day.
There is taste and aroma. The brain interprets the flavors.
Hey, on taste, some say there may be the ability to taste or sense fat and calcium. Jury is still out on those.
There are also physical qualities you can feel in the mouth, like arbonation, temperature, and body. They all contribute to the experience. Temperature also affects aroma/flavour, and carbonation affects acidity.
Add astringency to that. Not a flavor, but a sensation.
And alcohol “hotness”?