its true, in the chemical sense, tasting is not subjective, because the molecules that make up the flavors are real. however, the very real fact is that we have different abilities to sense those molecules and no way to verify how they stack up against others unless we calibrate against known standards (and this applies to all the senses). but just because tasting isn't subjective doesn't mean their isn't a ton of variance in its detection.

i run analytical instruments everyday, and a couple times a year my lab and a handful of others participate in an interlab calibration as a diagnostic to make sure the numbers we're generating are still accurate and within the defined window of error for our instruments. 6 standards of known concentrations are sent to each lab, numbered only 1-6. all the labs return the concentrations they measured for the same standards and all the results are reported. there is no way to know if you are off when you are generating the data, unless you participate in a program like this. No two labs EVER generate the exact same data. are the concentrations of the standards subjective? no. do the "experts" differ in their evaluation? absolutely.

another_jim wrote:Now, most of our preferences are idle. It may be polite and democratic to say our opinions in these idle matters counts as much as those of experts, but they actually don't. We don't spend as much time or money on our idle preferences as on our passions, so it doesn't have as much impact (individually) in the market. Nor will anyone seek out our advice on stuff we neither know nor care about.

this comment of very true (i feel the same way about desserts), but is it applicable regarding taste in/of coffee on a site for people who are passionate about coffee?

People don't need to prove anything to like something, as if scientific arguments were the only ones valid because they can be proven logically. There are a lot more points of view to chose from other than science. Do artists need to learn how the eyeball works? And how about a chef. Does he need to be an expert on chemistry? Enjoying a cup of coffee is not about science... except maybe here in this forum where it may be actually true. It is possible.

I do believe taste buds are 'developed' and can be more discerning ..

Arpi is right when he says he doesn't care about chemistry, he just cares what he likes.

In comparing Wines to Coffee, Living in France everyone is a Wine expert. Many have developed taste buds, and I even know a woman who can blind taste a wine and tell you within 40 km where it comes from with 90% success !!

Does she know more than the bum with his Thunderbird wine. Well, no, he likes his thunderbird and no one can tell him any different.

But she can and people on that level will enjoy their experience differently.

Its nice to know you have developed tastes, and have reached a level of appreciation not everyone can attain, and want to share that level with novices. But not everyone is ready to hear it unfortunately.

I am though

I think we need to distinguish between taste as in preference or "having good taste" and tastes as in flavours.

Understanding the latter can help us appreciate a good fruity coffee that is underextracted and one that isn't - the difference between floral and sour.... and that will increase our pleasure, which isn't the be all and end of all of life, but....

Wittgenstein. Completely with the Coffee Frog there. Interesting when you take it from language to the construction of identity and all.

Which is, funnily enough, not irrelevant.

Neither are colours.

If I want to make orange and someone explains that I can do that by mixing red and yellow, that contributes to my pleasure and understanding. But we need to have seen red and yellow together, and orange, and agreed to call them that.

And how I feel about them can be changed by my context - red the colour of sensual passion, red the colour of destructive anger etc.

Similar in short to the Yirgacheffe fruity but not the Yirgacheffe sour of someone who doesn't understand grinding fine and dosing moderately to extract properly.....

So I'm with Jim in many ways.

Naming flavours really can help.

But no one can tell us how we fell about them... though they can influence it.

God bless Arpi!

Back to work now....

Cheers

Mike

Mike -- my point exactly! The paramount issue when it comes to taste is the language of taste, that is how we communicate our perception of it to one another in a meaningful way. Learning to taste well, that is, learning to observe and describe the tastes you experience in a way that others who have done the same can understand where you're coming from.

I think that taste standards fit into this very well, i.e. a group of people like the SCAA deciding, collectively, what constitutes a well-balanced drink. One must understand that what's implicit in that standard is that it's not intended to be a universal truth, it's intended to be a measure by which a large set of drinks are compared. You can agree that the SCAA's standard rewards drinks that you like or not, but that is largely irrelevant to what the standard accomplishes.

... which is not to suggest that the standard is bulletproof in its consistency, either. Few sets of measuring tools in this world are completely, consistently accurate at measuring whatever they seek to measure. And humans' taste receptors are much more varied than, for example, a few cheap sets of calipers. Again, there's a margin of error with every tool that monitors everything that can be 'meaningfully' measured, and it's not that interesting for someone to say, "Foul! Foul! This taste rating system is crap because everyone's taste buds are different! It's genetic, it's scientific, and you're wasting your time!" Congratulations again, captain obvious, right? My experience with eating and drinking with other people is that taste experience is remarkably similar, most of the time, and that's good enough to make this interesting for me. Which is not to say that I am trying to be philosophically self-centered: my perception is that most people on this board would agree that we have very meaningful discussions of taste when we all try the same coffees, even across different rest times and different equipment, preparation methods, etc. I could be wrong about that, but I think I'll stick around till I find out for sure.

another_jim wrote:BTW, congrats, the Brits win again. Do I need to move from Chicago to London now to get really good espresso?

Having had a surprise layover in Chicago, trying to escape ATL back to London, then I think things are looking pretty good for you. Had a couple of lovely drinks at Intelli Broadway, and having tasted Mike Phillips' espresso backstage, I think Chicago has nothing to worry about. The brew recipe he used, as is on the Intelli site, was a pleasant surprise for me as I'd come to (foolishly I admit) expect big updosed shots, pulled short, from most places/baristas in the US. That, however, is a whole other ballgame.

I think the espresso coffee learning experience has been focused exclusively on the bean itself without regarding the subject. It could be that the other half of the espresso equation 'enjoyment' is in the subject itself and has nothing to do with understanding coffee, but with understanding people. And understanding people is understanding circumstances, desires, ways of being, etc.

another_jim wrote:I believe this is nonsense.
People have a right to "see" a green light and an empty intersection when the light is red and there's traffic, but they shouldn't drive, and they should go to an eye doctor.
Why should "tasting" something wonderful when they put crap in their mouths be any different? Granted, they aren't a public menace, but they do need help.

Shame! Hang your head! I can't countenance wise people making bad analogies.

However, I also tire of people saying, essentially, "if it feels good, drink it." Why spend your time on a site like HB if only to grease the bumpy road to Nirvana with silly nostrums? (and I don't even know what that word means!)

Taste is cultural, and as such, it's learned. Furthermore, I believe strongly in the regrettably-diminished notions of "professionalism" and "expertise." What's good science? That which is accepted by the community of scientists. What's good teaching? That which professional educators determine works well. What's good coffee? That which Jim and 4 other contributors to this site say it is. I'm here to learn, not to play with the big boys.

Sometimes culture needs the heavy hand of authority. That's why I tune in to HB. And regarding that stoplight / crap-in-mouth analogy, absolvo te; go and sin no more.

zin1953 wrote:I'm not trying to argue, but I am trying to see where you draw lines . . .

The line is fuzzy and wiggly. Taste (as in what do we like) is definitely cultural and is best understood in the domains of social science. Such preferences can be quantified with all sorts of "scientific" (read mathematical/statistical methods.) "Science," per se has little to offer, unless you are looking for biological predilections for flavors --sweet, bitter, etc.--, but not likely to explain why some people prefer a "full city" roast and some like Starbucks.

"Automatically agree" is your construction, not mine. I like hazelnuts and roast and eat them. I could be persuaded to like hazelnut coffee, but choose not to for socio-cultural reasons. Likewise, I really enjoy an aged Valtellina goat cheese that some family members liken to aged Nike's.

On average (copping out to fuzzy and wiggly) I'll pay most attention to critics and expertise in those domains in which I have the least expertise. Where I am an expert myself, the list of critics to whom I defer gets shorter. I may have misstated the actual number of coffee experts I pay attention to. The actual number is not 4. It's 137. You are currently at the mean, but rising.

Regards.

First off, I'm jumping into this one a bit late, and without fully digesting absolutely all of the discussion, though I read and skimmed all the post...

/disclaimer

One point that hasn't been addressed, or has been loosely addressed is the evolution of human heuristics and biases coupled with the cultural development of language. I'm not an expert in all of this, but have dabbled enough to offer a view that human development both biologically and culturally (focused after the development of spoken and written language) have marked differences between the senses of sight and taste/smell.

The evolution of our language and culture rapidly communicated a SHARED understanding of objectivity around the sense of sight, as it is fairly easy for the human animal to express and obtain consensus on the reality of what we see. Hearing, and language/culture has also developed more rapidly to consensus than taste/smell.

Think of your unconscious reactions to sights and sounds vs. smells and taste. How does your mind react to smells versus reactions to sights or sounds? Which of them can more easily trigger emotional reactions that you may not quickly name, and can even less quickly share with your fellow humans?

I understand Jim's argument for objectivity, and I think it is possible to calibrate different people to a shared set of standards for specific exercises. That said, it is a rigorous undertaking, as evidenced by the lengths to which sensory judges go in every exercise to repeat the calibration.

One could argue that this calibration is working against the natural biases and memory triggers our brains exhibit with respect to smells and tastes. Our brains and their built up biases and heuristics act differently to these senses.

Add to that our communication vehicle we now use--the typed word, which works against milennia of evolution of our human brains and their biases. We miss all of the signaling for which our non-rational brains have evolved to handle the natural environment. We "rational" humans have outpaced the ability for our non-rational selves to keep up in many ways. Hence the difficulty for us to communicate these thoughts and senses and feelings.

Like any endeavor, like our coffee journeys, the more questions we ask, the more we reveal how much we have yet to learn. Not a reason to stop, but a cautionary tale to ever declare that we have reached any objective truth. The observer cannot help but have an influence on what he or she observes, as the very act of observation changes the system.

Apropos, from the lastest post on Daniel Humphries' blog

"Smell is of all senses by far the most evocative: perhaps because we have no vocabulary for it — nothing but a few poverty-stricken approximations to describe the whole vast complexity of odor — and therefore the scent, unnamed and unnameable, remains pure of association; it cannot be called upon again and again, and blunted, by the use of a words; and so it strikes afresh every time, bringing with it all the circumstances of its first perception. This is particularly true when a considerable period of time has elapsed."

-Maturin, in Patrick O'Brian's Post Captain

On taste as a cultural versus an objective phenomenon.

I'm a sociologist, not a physicist, so I reject this whole way of framing the discussion. I don't live in a vast physical universe of empty spaces where we're a tiny patch of interesting chemical reactions, but in a vast cultural universe of empty celebrity chatter where science and the notion of atoms is a tiny patch of interesting discussion. Since most culture is as arid as empty space; the question is not whether taste is cultural, but how to make it a less arid patch of culture.

I suggested borrowing more from the language of science and less from the language of Brittany Spears ("gee, ya know, I'm really into all this coffee stuff"). Thankfully, everyone seems OK with the Brittany part, but the science part is creating misunderstandings.

A bit of wonkish history: Bacon wrote the Novum Organum around 1600, 20 years before the invention of modern science, advocating the use of observation and evidence in understanding nature. He was not being controversial, but was summarizing what educated people had been saying more and more in the previous 200 years. This renaissance objectivity had started not in science, but in law and trade, where the use of factual evidence to settle disputes, rather than the status of the disputants, or the preservation of social harmony and state interests, had done a lot to improve life. Bacon was advocating that this "reign of evidence" be adopted to all areas of life, including nature.

My recommendation is more Baconian than scientific. We need to think about what sort of evidence is appropriate to discussing whether a coffee or shot of espresso tastes good.

It's clear that when something goes wrong with an espresso shot, we speak very objectively. We explain an awful shot by the fact that it channeled, or that it was pulled at 210F, etc etc. We don't have a discussion of the cultural immersions of the people drinking it. In effect, we already have a common understanding that treats shot mechanics as an area where there is an undoubted and partially known connection between preparation and taste. The same undoubted and partially know connection exists between the taste of coffee and the place and way it was grown, and the way it was prepped, transported, roasted and blended. So when talking about why some coffees and blends taste good while others do not, we can profit by looking at this evidence first, and worrying about people's varying tastes and expertise later.

Interesting. Has anybody thought about preferences being unconscious?

An example. In general, rye bread is preferred in Germany. But the evolution of that preference seems to come from the fact that it is very cold over there, and because of the weather, rye grass is more suitable to grow. Once they make up their mind, it is hard to change it.

Taste is subjective, it really is. Tastes, however are not. Taste is cultural, Tastes are scientific.
And folk approach things in all kinds of different ways, as evidenced by the number a ratio of mental health care providers to mental health care purveyors. Some folk arr artistic in their endeavours, some are analytical, some are laissez faire.
If we all always like all the same things, there would always be a line.

But to attack the scientific approach is just ignorance. Analytical minds look to the variables, and try to reduce each result to an adjustment of each individual variable. This is normal for that kind of person (and you should be grateful, it was that kind of person that made the computer that you're sitting at possible) and quantifying those results on a scale of 'good' to 'not good' (with any number of metrics along the path) is necessary to have any kind of a reference.
One must keep in mind, especially in this varied and wise group, that because it is not your way is no indication of it's validity. If some method sounds odd, strange or wrong, there is just as good a chance that you just aren't able to understand or appreciate it, it as it contains flaws.

Psyd wrote:But to attack the scientific approach is just ignorance. Analytical minds look to the variables, and try to reduce each result to an adjustment of each individual variable. This is normal for that kind of person (and you should be grateful, it was that kind of person that made the computer that you're sitting at possible) and quantifying those results on a scale of 'good' to 'not good' (with any number of metrics along the path) is necessary to have any kind of a reference.

+1

Jim,

To clarify, I am not disagreeing with the approach to put more objectivity into tasting. I was trying, albeit poorly, to describe the cultural AND physiological barriers and resistance to the approach.

My view is that we are more influenced by our experiences and by our physiology with taste and smell respecting objective descriptions than we are with sight. Not something that cannot be overcome, but the hill is higher and requires more repeated conscious effort.

cfsheridan wrote:My view is that we are more influenced by our experiences and by our physiology with taste and smell respecting objective descriptions than we are with sight.

Ever go shopping with a woman? I am convinced that, except for trained artists, women can distinguish at least 10 times as many colors as men.

I once took a UCLA Extension course on visual aspects of film. I was stunned that in 40 years of watching movies and television I had never noticed that art directors coordinate the colors of set decor and the actors' costumes. Or that each film has a specific color palate. I never fail to notice these now. Eyes (or more accurately "brains") require as much training as palates.

"Some art directors coordinate the colors of set decor and the actors' costumes. Or that some films have a specific color palate."
Italics mine.

Corrected that for you. I've worked my share of feature films, and while I was just a sound mixer, I got to see every stick of set and costume on each.
Some Directors will make a costume color decision based on set/lighting/mood/, some costumers will make a color decision based on set/direction/lighting (although, quite often the lighting is completed on set, along with its design) and sometimes a set dresser will get clues from costume/Key Grip/Director, etc.
The thing is that it's a collaborative art form. much the same way that theatre is. The goal is to set the mood, and often colour and lighting is a huge part of it. Go see 'The Girl with the Pearl Earring'. The Gaffer reproduced the lighting form the period, using Jan's paintings as a guide. The sets were constructed using the paintings as a guide as well. You 'll have to see it twice. Once where you just stare at the lighting, and again to get, you know, plot, and acting and such.

Be careful of such things, though. Once you see the zipper on the monster, the scary movies aren't so scary anymore. Quite a bit of what we do is supposed to massage your subconscious into a time, a mood, and expectation, or even a location, without you being quite aware that you are being manipulated. Trust me, unless you're interested in following that road professionally, it will just ruin your appreciation of such arts.

In much the same way that I advocate staying at the coffee level that you are at if you really like it. Nothing but tigers and pitfalls down that road to the god shot! ; >