Comment on Anon works in a restaurant

• CodexArcanum@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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    • psud@aussie.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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

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• Akasazh@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Old style AF beers had a distinct malty musty smell. But with new techniques AF beers can be indistinguisable. Certainly if hop foreward

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  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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    • Akasazh@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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.

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      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I still find that surprising, do you have stats that you can link?

        The smell of alcohol alone is very distinctive, so I don’t think most would need to even taste it to know it’s AF. It might fool them if it’s served in an area with a lot of alcoholic drinks nearby, but even then a quick sniff should make it plainly obvious to me and, I assume, most people. I don’t have a particularly keen sense of smell (my wife smells a lot of stuff I don’t notice), so I don’t think I’m special here.

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