In "Breakfast at Tiffany's" Holly's cat was just named "Cat". I don't have anything to add other than I was helping Jim during the demonstration he conducted at last month's Coffee Con and the sour bitter tests were very dramatic and illuminating.

Bob_M wrote:Martin I believe that Opponency is the concept that was brought up by creative nickname [. . . nerve impulses travel to the brain where they are reprocessed and thus perceived as something other than the original stimulus. That could certainly be what's going on here.

Agreed. However, as with most analogies (here, color/flavor) once we note the helpful comparison we may not be adding much explanatory value. For example, saying "due to the way that we process the simultaneous activation," can be a bit tautological if it doesn't continue and give me an insight into "the way" or "the process." Likewise, saying that the color/flavor information is "reprocessed" doesn't comport with my new understanding of the neurological mechanisms involved:

So, the new bit of information for me is that with some flavors the information processing is not entirely additive in a way that comports analogously with my naive color mixing (red + blue = purple) or food seasoning (french fries + salt = salty french fries.) Rather, at least part of these processes is subtractive (or "cancelling.") And possibly we are dealing with a filtering process (analogous to viewing a color scene through a color filter.)

I used to drink my coffee & espresso with LOTS of sugar.
Now I have not been using any.
After an extended fast my taste has seemed to have changed a bit. For better? For the worse???

At first I could not stand the taste of espresso after eating again.
Now my brain remembers why I love it.

My question is, why does a sink shot get worse when I try to save it by adding sugar?
Is it because I have not been using sugar? OR is it just being my taste perception?
This reminds me of one trying to cover body odor with cologne, it just makes it worse.

This has me perplexed.
Although the balance of flavors makes sense as in acidic / alkaline = neutral.

insatiableOne wrote:My question is, why does a sink shot get worse when I try to save it by adding sugar?

In the taste test, the few people who preferred the "cocktails" at extreme bitter or sour also added a lot more sugar than those who preferred theirs more balanced. But I did not ask people who liked balanced to try to save something unbalanced with a lot of sugar; so I don't know if some of them would have thought it just made it worse.

My personal experience disagrees with yours, in that I think extreme shots are improved with sugar. But it's all in the realm of make do and second best, where the choice is between bad and worse rather than good and better I could be wrong, but I don't think there is much to be learned by making people chart their "bad or worse" preferences.

another_jim wrote:My personal experience disagrees with yours, in that I think extreme shots are improved with sugar.

There may be some threshold or odd combination of flavors because I've experienced both phenomena of being able to save things but also making things worse by trying to adjust with sweetness.

Mostly thinking about trying to save a pot of chili that was too spicy or a tomato sauce that was too salty. While sugar in one form or another was added to both, and realizing that sugar probably may not have been the true "opposite" of either of these flavor problems, it definitely made the chili edible while making the tomato sauce totally disgusting.

Anyway, this thread is super interesting. I took a short break from espresso\coffee after a trip to Ireland and enjoying their tea so much, but started it back up again and find I kept fighting balance. Came here to search on things and this gave me some new insight. It made me question how much balance I'm fighting versus fighting intensity\concentration.

With the strega\hg1 I feel like I'm generally wrestling in the corner of being too bright\acidic but also not being able to grind much finer or reduce dose\flow. As such, I've found that if I run things a bit past blonde, the balance comes back, or perhaps the intensity drops, which improves the overall flavor, while making the body suffer only slightly. This reminds me of one of your past discussion threads regarding adding water to the shot, much akin to adding water to scotch\whisky\etc to reduce the intensity of alcohol on the palate, but in this case, it's adding "coffee water" from the blonded portion.

To summarize what people have said in this thread: Starting, say, from a sour extraction, we may increase the temperature T (or the pressure P) to produce a balanced drink, and there may be at least 3 interpretations of this phenomenon :

1) Objective one : Increasing T (or P) changes the kinematics (and/or thermodynamics) of the chemical reactions. This may lower the extraction rate of acids and/or increase the extraction rate of bases to increase the pH.

2) Subjective one: Increasing T (or P) favors the extraction of bitter substances without changing the pH. Our receptors sensitive to acids and bases produce two signals, whose combined effect in our brain is interpreted as something "good". (This seems similar with the red and yellow wave lengths which excite two kinds of "conical receptors" on our retina. In this case the stimulation of these 2 types of receptors is identical to what it would be by sending light with pure orange wave length. The signal along the optic nerve is identical and our brane interpretation as well. The difference with the case of gustatory receptors is that in this case, there is no pure material (analogous to orange light) that may produce identical excitations. But who cares.)

3) Subjective one : Increasing T (or P) favors the extraction fo sugars (and/or caramels) without changing the pH. Our receptors sensitive to acids and sugars (and or caramels) produce two signals, whose combined effect in our brain is interpreted as something "good". (This seems similar to not feel acid a coca cola whose ph=3.)

Concerning Interpretation 1, someone here probably knows how much the pH of coffee varies with the brew temperature (or P). Does it increase ? And if yes, enough for us to be sensitive to its variation ?
Who has pH paper ?

The initial experiment was done with citric acid and gentian, not espresso. The idea that increased temeporature favors bitters and snubs sours, while increased extraction (finer grind and lower dose) increases sweetenss and buffering compounds, is "common knowledge," since this is how people dial in shots.

Extraction measurements confirm the second half of this story. But the temperature versus sour/bitter part is purely empiric, the physical basis for it has not been established. Acidity measures of coffee are difficult and inconsistent according to the published research. Some writers say there is no correlation between pH and sour taste. Others say that if you use titration methods that are unaffected by buffers, you can establish such a correlation.

Finally, I can't recall any published research between the phenomenology and physiology of bitterness (except the super taster gene irrelevancies -- "we have no clue what you are tasting, or how; but whatever it is, congratulations, you are the champion")

What about trying to balance an otherwise sink shot with sour or bitter solution like the experiment? Is this more effective than sugar?

I've never tried. It could well balance out the excess; but only at the cost of adding an interfering flavor. Sugar is a relatively tasteless sweetness; but bitters and sours all have their own characteristic flavors as well. Citric, malic and tartaric acids are from citrus, apples and wine respectively; gentian, cascarilla, cassian, quinine, and orange peel, the most common flavors used in bitters, also each have their own characteristic flavor

Could it be that acidity may be a label that is used for a wider range of flavors, I am currently thinking that metallic tastes, or ions also tickle the acid taste buds. (Much like capsicain does with heat sensors in the body)
In that case pH will indeed not say much, but a combination of pH and free (metal?) ions may.

Just for fun I will try to balance the next sour sink shot with angostura bitters, see what is left of the flavours after that (shot is ruined anyhow).
Still battling with sour espresso so shouldn't be long...

Edit: the sour can be cancelled to some extent, but like Jim predicted the taste of the bitters is added to the espresso.

http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultran ... Taste.html