How to tell if you are a supertaster | Hacker News Reader

How to tell if you are a supertaster

nautil.us

71 pointsgpresot51 comments

This is an article about beer with a small addendum about taste.

The author's analogy is based on a false premise of bitterness being universally repulsive as a flavour. Within the group of those with heightened tastebuds that can more accurately taste it, disdain for bitter is not uniform. I.e. I've a much keener than average sense of taste and smell. I hate beer because I dislike the basic essence, regardless of ingredient/flavour variation, which is due to my dislike of bitters as a flavour group. However, I know others who may be considered "supertasters" that like bitter flavours and go out of their way to consume certain foods of peculiar/distinct bitterness. Likewise, some "supertasters" prefer sourness as their top choices, etc. Edit: Similarly, "normal tasters" can like or dislike bitter (in varying combinations and intensities) but dislike doesn't automatically equate to stronger sense of taste/smell.

Bitterness is a naturally evolved reaction to unpalatable and dangerous foods. It's not a false premise, it's merely the biological premise behind the development of bitter receptors in the first place. We developed bitter receptors to help us identify dangerous plantlife. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_taste_evolution (Or for the biologists out there, random development of bitter reception was naturally selected for as a trait which improve fitness). However some two million to half a million years ago, we stopped depending on bitter reception for survival as much because of meat eating and cooking. So it's not expressed as strongly in people anymore.

So sure, some people enjoy bitter. But people do bad things. Alcohol is a poison through and through and we as a species love it.

Doesn't mean it's not a poison! i.e. just because someone enjoys bitter doesn't invalidate the fact that bitter is unpleasant and our natural instinctual reaction to it is avoidance.

If someone enjoys bitter then to them it's not unpleasant, surely, by definition?

"just because someone enjoys bitter doesn't invalidate the fact that bitter is unpleasant"

If they enjoy the taste then it cannot be deemed unpleasant. Taste is subjective, therefore, not universal.

You also can't deem evolutionary usage that ceased millions of years ago as basis for usage today and citing analogies employed around function/after-effect to an argument about preference is weak.

> If they enjoy the taste then it cannot be deemed unpleasant

why ? a lot of people have no problem enjoying unpleasant things, it doesn't makes them less unpleasant

The error here is attributing a linear cause and effect or purpose to evolution. There might be evolutionary pressure towards developing detection of certain things as bitter and an aversion to the flavor, but it's just one pressure among many.

The fact that so many people enjoy bitter things so much means that clearly the traits you talk about aren't universal or complete.

> Supertasters find beer incredibly bitter, [...] Suffice it to say, hard liquor is a no-no for supertasters. [...] unless they have been conditioned to drink beer, they more than likely will first and foremost consider both as just really bitter.

Huh. This might explain my extreme dislike for beer, and why I hate olives? For some time I've believed it may be a genetic mutation similar to why some people say cilantro tastes like soap.

The "supertaster" testing kit I found on amazon was actually intended to demonstrate simple genetics in a classroom setting, as apparently the ability to taste the chemicals was considered an ideal demonstration of genetics (though apparently the science is slightly muddier now)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTC_tasting

I could taste the PTC chemical and the list of foods on the Wikipedia that supertasters wouldn't like certainly chimed with me:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supertaster#Specific_food_sens...

I've never thought of it as particularly "super", I've always felt it was just me being picky and that it was my fault for not making more of an effort.

Yep. Most beer for me is insanely bitter. Red wine is a strict no, it's grotesque for me. Some red wine out there, that people otherwise tell me is good, tastes literally like a car tire.

I wonder if this means that super-tasters would be bad chef-cooks, when cooking for not-super-tasters. Everything they make would be lacking in bitter tastes.

Then I wonder if the best chef-cook would be the one with the same taste. I.e. if I am a non-taster, then I need a non-taster chef-cook, etc.

Another thing I'm curious about is if this property is really that black-and-white (or ternary) as the article suggests. Tasting bitter requires a certain gene, but I guess there are other genes for other tastes, and also for smells, etc.

Confirmed 'supertaster' here and while beer and most spirits are a no-no, throwing them into Red Bull or other ultra sweet mixers makes them quite enjoyable ;-) I also hated olives but have conditioned myself to tolerate them by constant exposure.

Hating alcohol except when it has a ton of sweetness added to it, is still hating alcohol.

The saying “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down” is not making a point that medicine tastes good.

I don't like black sugarless coffee either, but with sugar and milk it's quite nice. So do I like coffee or not?

Depends. Is the black coffee disgusting or tolerable?

If the black coffee is disgusting to you by itself, then the sugar is just masking it and it's the sugar that you really like.

If the coffee just tastes plain but improves with the sugar, then it would be fair to characterize it as liking coffee.

I've talked to people who swear up and down that they like alcohol, but they only like Smirnoff Ice and cosmos and can't tolerate anything else. That's not liking alcohol.

If we're being that pedantic, then surely you'd need to ask people what they thought about pure alcohol, which I think is liked by basically no-one. And if you don't like that, then you can't say you like vodka or beer, you just like the extra water etc.

In reality, when people say "I like alcohol" they mean they like some subset of alchohol based drinks, and when people say they like coffee they mean some subset of coffee based drinks.

But perhaps more importantly, we're talking as if there was some macho points to be gained by liking the taste of a poisonous substance that is often abused by addicts to the detriment of their health and the lives of those they love when presented in some abitrarly acceptable mixtures but not others.

My wife gave me the paper strip super taster test. She is a vile, vile woman. We also tried the counting method later. I recommend the strips so long as the subject doesn't know the expected reaction. It's easier to do. Being a supertaster is not a good thing necessarily. Earlier in life I avoided a lot of foods. It was only after I forced myself to put up with the bitterness and accept it'd always be there that I was able to branch out. One curious thing I've found is that I have a very strong like of certain smells. Some of them are smells others consider off putting or uncomfortable. Things like cardboard, paper, certain glues, heavy mechanical grease, certain rubber smells, skunk spray (yes the animal), the belts in bowling ball return chutes, etc all smell intoxicating. The only other person I found with a similar interest is also a super taster. I wonder if there is a correlation.

I don't think I'm a supertaster (for bitter) but it has to be said that a very large percentage of IPAs is just really bad, among inexperienced microbrewers there seems to be a race to max IBUs.

That is a thing a lot of new brewers don't really understand about how to get actual hop flavor into your beer. In the initial boiling process when hops are added they almost solely contribute IBUs with very little flavor, because the boiling process destroys the delicate flavor compounds.

It is only hops added as the wort cools down, or during the dry hopping process, that contribute to the moral floral and piney flavors some IPAs have. This is why beers such as Dogfish ehad 60 and 90 minute IPAs are so popular, because they used a continuous hopping rate which meant many of the hop flavors end up in the beer and not just making it bitter.

Course experienced brewers know about hopping schedules and dry hopping, but...

Denverite here (lots of microbreweries in the area). This is obviously anecdote, but it seems that the desire to max out the IBUs in Pale Ales and India Pale Ales has run its course. I never was a big IPA fan and couldn't even order a standard Pale Ale for years. I feel I can now safely order a Pale Ale in most places that isn't super bitter.

You may be right. Even in hops-obsessed Oregon it's getting easier to get drinkable microbrews again. There are brewers stepping up to the challenge of making interesting lagers now.

A simple way I was taught by a geneticist was to drink a Diet Coke. If it is sweet you are not a super-taster; if it is bitter you are.

For me all diet drinks taste very bitter like quinine or biting into a green potato.

Surely they taste bitter for everyone at first? You may eventually come to prefer that and find "regular" soda sickly sweet, as I do.

Diet cola tasted sweet to me the few times I had it (I don't drink pop generally). Couldn't imagine finding it bitter.

It's a strange test. I can taste the bitter and the sweet in aspartame. Even so, I'd qualify Diet Coke as sweet, even though both tastes are there.

Worse, the formula has changed over the years. Diet Coke used to be closer to Coke Zero but, after Coke Zero was launched, drifted to a more bitter taste.

This seems an odd test - when I first had diet coke it tasted weird, but it became an acquired taste and now normal coke tastes weird.

I took a DNA test that told me I could taste bitter and only 40% of the population could taste it.

I never liked the bitter beers.

But I'm European and male, so I'm probably no supertaster

Random English tip!

'I made a dna test' means that you have created a dna test. 'I took a dna test' means you have performed a dna test on yourself.

'made' and 'performed' are the same word in a few European languages.

Thank you :)

Yes, I'm German, we often simplify this:

    Ich machte einen DNS Test.
    I   made   a     DNA test.

Correct would be the passive form:

    Ich habe eine DNS Test machen lassen.

Which corresponds more to the English "took" I guess :)

I hate bitter flavors and most beers and diet drinks taste awful to me but I'm no supertaster...my wife who has never been tested for it on the other hand happily eats bitter things and loves beer but can eat a dish and decompose it into constituent ingredients. She definitely has a sharper palate but I'm not sure she'd qualify either. Maybe it's something that's measured on a spectrum?

> But they more than likely will not be able to tell the difference between a Columbia hopped beer and a Cascade hopped beer.

If that's the bar for a nontaster then I'm a super-nontaster. I did a beer blind test once and even though I like beer I wrongly identified IPAs as lager etc. I don't think I got a single one correct.

Unless you like and have access to certain beers, the article won't tell you any such thing. Perhaps the book from which the piece is excerpted does.

Exactly. Title should be changed to "How to get a nice buzz while nominally finding out if you are a supertaster".

It tells you how to measure the papillae on your tongue to determine if you are a super-taster.

My taste preferences have gone through a pretty radical change over the last three years or so. I never liked spicy foods before, but I started to use Sriracha which led me to search out other spicy foods. Now I feel very unmotivated to go to any restaurant that doesn't offer a spicy food dish.

I know this is off topic, but it is be interested in hearing if others have had similar experiences

The answer to the title's question is in the last paragraph of the article.

> What is an effective technique for examining how many papillae someone has in a given area of the tongue? All of them involve darkening it, and the most enjoyable is to swirl red wine in the mouth and over the tongue. If done correctly, you will be able to see little lumps of tissue on the tongue that are the papillae. Next, take a piece of three-hole notebook paper. The punched holes are about 6 or so millimeters in diameter, and a piece of paper torn off with one of these holes can be placed over the darkened tongue. Now simply count the number of papillae you see in the punched hole. If you have fewer than 4 papillae, you are more than likely a nontaster, whereas from 4 to 8 papillae would suggest that you are a taster. Anything over 8 would indicate that you are a supertaster or a super-supertaster.

The feeling is apparent with a bottle of El Dorado sipping run from Guyana.

> Rob DeSalle is curator of entomology in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City

Nothing against the author, but when I see "Sackler," I think of that family's contribution to the opioid epidemic, which I learned from through HN.

The Family That Built an Empire of Pain | The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-tha...

Who is to blame for the opioid epidemic? - Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/who-is-to-blame-for-...

Who Profits from the Opioid Crisis? Meet the Secretive ...: https://www.democracynow.org/2017/10/19/who_profits_from_the...

I read the title at first as "How to tell if you are superstar"

Me too. It would be a completely believable title for an article upvoted on Hacker News.

Same. I was then expecting the first comment to be "If you have to ask ..."

As did I, then I saw the sub-headline of "For one thing, you won’t like IPAs." and I got sad for myself.

I did the technical way. I downloaded my genome from 23andme and looked for the (I don't know the terminology) 'things' with the letters that indicate I have the genes. Coupled with the physical evidence (I find beer and green vegetables sour to the point of being vile), turns out I'm in the club..

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