We all have palates and they all vary. Some of us enjoy steak, some enjoy chicken, some enjoy tofu, while others dig them all. Same goes with beer. But it's a bit more complicated as each beer/style is supposed to have a certain taste and many can be aged. Based on a recent discussion regarding older batches of Adam, where it was noted that they don't age well by some while I didn't find them to be bad, it got me thinking. Just because one person says it's past it's prime or going downhill, this may not be true for everyone. Some people have very refined palates and have the ability to pick out very suble flavors in a beer. On the other hand, some people may have palates that don't pick up "off flavors" in a beer. I have never focused a lot of time in reviewing beers primarily because I have limited time and I kinda like my grading scale: Good---tolerable---bad. I know palates evolve and improve over time, but is it possible that some people just lack the ability to taste certain flavors and they never will? I recall a tasting a couple weeks ago where someone picked up vanilla but I never did even when I was trying.
Yup. Very clearly happens. Some is likely from lack of experience/exposure to certain flavors in certain settings, while others is simply that some people pick up certain flavors more strongly than do others. It happens, don't sweat it.
I still stand by my claim that a lot of people are full of a lot of crap when it comes to their abilities to discern flavors and such.
It's weird...sometimes I can really detect flavors I normally wouldn't but other times it just tastes like beer.
We all cant be super tasters. Thats what makes beer fun. I get X and you get Y. Its fun to argue over a pint. Although you will find some people in your group or certain reviewers who you tend to agree with. That what you can share some notes and find new beers from all over you would/might like. Cheers!
While I agree that this is probably true 90% of the time (myself included in that 90%) there are people out there that have amazingly trained palates. My dad was recently at a small winery and asked the winemaker if a particular wine came from a vineyard that was near a pine forest. Flabbergasted, the winemaker said yes, it was bordered on three sides by a pine forest but that no one had ever asked that before. My dad could taste the pine resin that had blown in the air and affixed itself to the skin of the grapes. To the OP, with wine tasting they sell kits (http://www.makescentsofwine.com/) that have some of the component aromas of wine and you take two glasses of identical wine and then put a couple of drops in one, then try to detect the difference. Next time you put in less, until the difference is perhaps only one drop. In this way you slowly train yourself to detect subtle flavors. So just like a muscle some people are going to have a natural ability to detect certain flavors at lower concentrations than others but with practice a lot can be gained.
Environment, experience, what you've eaten beforehand, and plain ol' BS make up the main components of taste description.
Our club has planned to get the off flavors kit and we're going to brew a bunch of SmasH beers, as well as the usual dissection of styles at every meeting. I have found my tasting ability improves, but also at times it is better than at others, especially lately, and I believe it may be because of a feast of very hoppy beers I periodically enjoy. I never taste metal, copper penny, or acetone (perhaps luckily with this), but all the other descriptors I've read I have tasted in beers, not always to the same degree as others. Wish I had a better palate. But taste the airborne pine of a bordering wood in a wine? Wooaaah
I for one have a palate that cannot discern many of the different flavors that reviewers often site in their reviews. Our taste-buds only "taste" the basics; bitter, sour, salty/sweet and edamame. The rest of our sense of taste is actually from our sense of smell. Try it sometime, plug your nose/hold your breath and take a sip, see what taste you get, then swallow, repeat, only this time normally breathing. It is amazing the difference this makes. So if you don't have a good sense of smell, your palate is therefore not as "refined", like me. I enjoy strong flavors in both my food and my beer, double/triple IPA's, Imperial Stout's etc, otherwise I just don't taste it.
You've obviously never eaten in a Szechuan restaurant I'm sure some of it comes from one's upbringing and cultural experiences in setting a baseline for different sensations early in life (as an example, I come from an Italian-American household, and was quite familiar with bitter flavors from way before I came to enjoy beer- so I wasn't overwhelmed at first and was able to experience things beyond the bitterness), though those things can be overcome. Other aspects are definitely genetic- somebody mentioned Supertasters above, here's a little more info on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster
