Alcohol tasting sweeter after coffee

[kahvedelisi]

I find alcohol tasting sweeter after drinking coffee (especially after espresso). And it's more evident with wine. Am I delusional or is it really so? I've tested this with various wines, with brandy and whisky. I don't get the same effect with vodka or rum though.. Any logical explanations to this?

Speaking of wine... Where's Mr. Zin1953 when we need him!?

[zin1953]

I have no idea. I mean, I'm here -- I know where I am -- but I have no idea why a wine, brandy,or whisk(e)y would be perceived as "sweeter."

The only thing that comes to mind is the phenomenon that has (repeatedly) takes place at commercial wine competitions. It is difficult to go from tasting sweet wines to tasting dry wines. It is also difficult to taste light-bodied wines after full-bodied (often tannic) wines. Back in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s (even, at some events, into the early 1990s0, many professional wine judgings/competitions would have the judges evaluate the sweet dessert wines after tasting wines like Cabernet Sauvignon, Petite Sirah, and other tannic wines. The result was that a disproportionate number of late-harvest dessert wines received the highest honors. Why? Because after those astringent, mouth-searing tannins, the sweet white wines tasted sooooooooooo good . . . .

OK. Fast forward to your espresso. Espresso has tannins. Depending upon the type of wine you had (and its level of tannins), I can see how the smoothness of a particular wine might be perceived as sweetness. As for brandy and whisk(e)y . . . let me work on it.

Cheers,
Jason

[CoffeeOwl]

I find alcohol tasting sweeter after drinking coffee (especially after espresso). And it's more evident with wine. Am I delusional or is it really so? I've tested this with various wines, with brandy and whisky. I don't get the same effect with vodka or rum though.. Any logical explanations to this?

Speaking of wine... Where's Mr. Zin1953 when we need him!?

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I don't know if it will sound logical to anybody , but I have an explanation on the basis of chinese medicine.
Coffee belongs to fire element, is hot (as opposite to green tea which is cool) and intense (has a lot of the quality). So if one has an opposite element food after drinking it, then one feels like getting to a balance. And the balance is earth element, and the taste aligned with it is sweet taste. (Sweet in this manner is also beef meat, cheese, milk, cake).
From practical point of view, there are sweet notes in brandy and whiskey and they get altered in our perception after we drink coffee because we always long for the balance. With whiskey the thing is that it also belongs to metal element, and fire controls metal - that means by having whiskey after coffee you reduce the hot fire effect by hot metal.
And the wine... I suppose you meant sweet wines, not the dry ones? For the dry wines tasting better would be a bit of surprise to me, unless they are a bit cooled or something.
Pawel