Ruined by Proxy

I had one experience where suddenly the dogfish punkin' ale I was drinking tasted like vomit...and now it always does.

It used to be one of my favorites.

 

I ruined Devil Dancer for my wife. She didn't taste the onion/garlic combo until I pointed it out.

 

Not craft and not recent but I found Tecate to be oily at one time which reminded me of when I accidentally ingested jet fuel. I could immediately taste the jet fuel after my brain sensed the correlation. There's not enough lime on earth to convince the brain you are NOT in fact drinking a petroleum product.

For the record, I'd rate "mouthfeel" for jet fuel as 0.00.

 

Thinking of saliva and chewing gum as you're drinking a beer might ruin it for me too.

Lesson learned I guess. :/

 

Wow never seen this thread before kudos for being original. I don't have any stories but so far this is an awesome thread.

 

Yup, the moment someone said that some west coast IPAs have a "cat piss" aroma and taste, I couldn't un-taste it and still can't to this day

 

Hell, I eat Epoisse, nothing anyone says about a beer is going to change my opinion of whether or not I like it.

 

...although how would anyone know what a glassful of saliva from someone chewing gum tasted like?

I think the same thing when I hear "wet horse blanket" - like, you've tasted that?

Although I do get that certain terms become baseline descriptors, like "dank" or "funky" - but when I hear "cat piss" it's like, ewww... How do you even know what that's like? lol

 

I love cat piss IPAs.

 

How do they know? Roughly 75% of flavor comes from the smells that make up the aroma. It's powerful enough that smells can mislead you into thinking you are tasting one thing when it really is a different one. So for some folks if it smells like urine that's a flavor they pick up. Some hops produce smells that even the pro tasters describe as being like cat urine. I've known some folks so sensitive to the oder of cat urine they can tell on first visit not long after walking in the door if someone has a cat living in the house, even without seeing it or the litter box.

As for the smell of gum chewing saliva, if you chew gum you've tasted/smelled your own.

 

Well, to balance that out, things can also be made better by proxy. E.g. If you review a beer and then go look at what some of the better reviewers have to say about it you can sometimes realize what it was you liked while you were tasting. Having a name for it helps with being able to pick certain things out from all the other flavors.

 

Yeah - guess I didn't think that one through lol - although I must confess, familiar with both cat urine and bubblegum, those happen to be characteristics I've never picked up on in a beer...

Cheers

 

Interesting. You don't get something like bubblegum from some hefeweizen?

 

No - there was thread somewhere about the banana-like character in hefeweizens where this came up, too - perhaps because I don't chew gum?

 

Quite possible that if you never chewed bubble gum you'd not recognize the flavor if it walked up and bit you in the a... :-)

I once knew a professional taster who made it a point when visiting a new country to go find as many new and different flavored spices and dishes he'd never tried so he could learn what tasters from that country were referrring to in their descriptions.

 

I definitely get bubblegum from some hefes. This was far before I was into craft beer, read beer reviews online, etc. so it was an organic thought.

 

How... how does that happen?

 

I've always wondered what jet fuel tasted like, but I've never had the balls, though my cousins tricked me into huffing gas once as a youngster...how have you imbibed and in what way?...