As someone who works in taste
Is this an exotic way of saying that your a chef?
Comment on Anon works in a restaurant
Akasazh@feddit.nl 1 month agoAs someone who works in taste, people tend to overestimate their tasting abilities. Alcohol free beer, meatless snacks, etc. When presented without focusing attention to taste, people generally don’t notice.
If you give both options and are forward about it they will be 50% correct in discerning the ‘alternative’. Realization comes more clearly in the absence of physiological change (no inebriation, no caffeine effect).
However if people do find out you’re cheating them you can sell legit product all day, but people will still doubt you. So don’t expect long term business.
RobertoOberto@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Akasazh@feddit.nl 1 month ago
No I’m a sommelier
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Um, the smell alone is a dead giveaway, since alcohol has a very distinct smell.
CodexArcanum@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Beer doesn’t usually smell of ethanol, it smells like hops and yeast. Since most AF beers are built to model light ales anyway, I can hardly tell. I’ve also gotten really into mocktails lately and with the right mixes of bitters and syrups most of them are significantly better than real cocktails. With those, that gasoline taste of ethanol is noticeably absent in a good way!
I know exactly how caffeine affects me though, and would pretty quickly realize I’d been given decaf.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Really? I don’t drink, so maybe I’m more sensitive to the smell, but beer of all variety has the same alcohol smell that wine and liquors have. Yeah, there’s hops and yeast in there as well, but there’s also that alcohol smell.
I actually like that smell oddly enough, but it’s very distinctive. I’m also very used to the smell of yeast (we bake bread fairly often) and malt (I love AF malt beer), but I’m not as familiar with the smell of hops, so I just assume that’s the “beer” smell I’m smelling.
psud@aussie.zone 1 month ago
I like beer and drink a fair bit of it, and make it. I have had some alcohol free beers and have recognised that they were either bad or alcohol free on the first taste, even when I was blind to the lack of alcohol
Low alcohol can be made good. I have made a 2% stout which tasted good and a 3% hazy pale ale and both taste fine, but you can’t get to low enough alcohol to call it alcohol free through fermentation
Apparently you can get to alcohol free through reverse osmosis which doesn’t wreck hop flavours (which boiling or vacuum boiling will wreck). Perhaps I haven’t had any alcohol free beer made with reverse osmosis
Akasazh@feddit.nl 1 month ago
Old style AF beers had a distinct malty musty smell. But with new techniques AF beers can be indistinguisable. Certainly if hop foreward
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
They’re probably more similar, but there’s no way they can mimic that distinctive alcohol smell (same smell in wine and liquor). I’d take a bet any day that I can distinguish any AF from regular beer, provided the regular beer is at least the typical 4-5% ABV.
Akasazh@feddit.nl 1 month ago
Oh I don’t dispute people can distinguish it by taste. Like I said, if not informed of the possibility that the beer is NA (or the coffee decaf) most people won’t notice. When informed of the possibility less than half of people can distinguish it relyably.
But most people are shure they would distinguish the taste any day of the week, and the chance is biggest that they can’t.