Factors include mouthfeel and the solubility of bittering compounds, which don’t all react with our saliva the same way.
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(Look for Your Tasting Brain: How It Works and How to Use It-unless the publisher changes the title-sometime in 2024.) He explains that humans and other mammals tend to respond to all bitter chemicals in the same way-on our tongues, they all create the same type of bitterness. Mosher is writing a book about the physiology and psychology of how we taste, so he is deep in the weeds on this topic. “It appears that they all get dumped into the same perceptual bucket.” “Despite having 25 bitter receptors, there’s no evidence that we perceive different kinds of bitterness per se,” he says. Our bitterness receptors appear to be pretty straightforward, according to Randy Mosher, author of Tasting Beer, contributor to this magazine, and a noted wizard on anything sensory-related. Oddly, how our taste buds detect bitterness may be much simpler than that. Besides noticing how much bitterness, we tend to taste and describe different kinds and qualities of bitterness-soft, sharp, round, smooth, crisp, drying, resinous, quick, lasting, clean, firm, etc.
He likes to say that our enjoyment of bitterness sets us apart from our animal selves-it’s a sign of culture and civilization.Īs people who taste and evaluate a lot of beer, we’re used to thinking about bitterness in a nonlinear way. Consider the argument put forward by Yvan De Baets, founder-brewer at the Brasserie de la Senne in Brussels and one of the finest bitter-beer brewers in the business. It’s long been thought that our ability to detect it was a defense against poison, but the evidence for that is mixed-plenty of bitter things are healthy. It’s a fascinating evolutionary quirk that we can both taste and enjoy bitterness. Along the way, we’ll ponder some practical ways to harness it as one of beer’s truly addictive qualities-while still, I think, pleasing the crowd. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the recent science on bitterness in the context of modern IPA. Instead, it’s enough to recognize that food and drink trends are cyclical-and when things come back around, we have the know-how to do them better than before, with an awareness of past mistakes and deeper technical knowledge about how to achieve our goals. We’re looking for reliable, consistent bitterness anywhere we can get it.įor me to get up on the soapbox and plead with you to bring real bitterness back would be an honest thing to do, but it’s not the best use of this space or your precious time. It’s no wonder that pilsners and cold IPAs are both brewer-driven trends. We can see it in recipes we’ve published over the past nine years, and we hear it from brewers on the podcast-fewer IBUs, little to no hops in the kettle, more hops in the whirlpool, and many more in the tank. All we need to do is observe the ongoing popularity of hazy IPAs and to see that even many so-called West Coast–style IPAs are soft in profile, lacking crispness and sharp edges-many taste like hazies without the haze. Yet it shouldn’t take a ream of quantitative data to convince you that bitterness has changed. Sorry for painting with a broad brush among 10,000-plus breweries in North America, there are always exceptions, and here at the magazine we’re lucky to taste some of the very best. But how many great ones are there, really, compared to those that kick your tongue in the end with some astringent, rubbery hop bite? Granted, when you have a really great hazy IPA-bright, juicy, smooth, without the cloy-you get what it’s all about. Whether that’s a good thing depends on your taste, or-if you’re running a brewery-whether that softness sells.Īt the same time, IPAs have gotten harsh in seemingly new ways.
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