Things that Yoram knows: why not hot beer and cold soup?

"Snail" asks: Why are there drinks that are drunk cold and those that are drunk hot? Why not hot beer and cold chicken soup?

The idea of ​​hot beer sounds especially bad until you remember that the Babylonians invented the beer (or the liquor) in hot Iraq long before the invention of the refrigerator, it is likely that for many centuries the beer was drunk at room temperature and I mean a Mesopotamian room and not a cold cellar in Bavaria. So who really determined which drink to pull from the fridge and which from the pot?

Two explanations are offered for the preference for drinks at certain temperatures, some are looking for an optimal temperature that is adapted to the aroma substances in the drink and there are those who simply attribute the preference to habit.

When you ask the wine, beer or coffee experts, the answer is that the temperature of the drink determines its aroma, for each wine or beer you can adjust the ideal temperature at which its unique characteristics will be emphasized. Taste is a very primitive sense, we notice combinations of only four basic tastes and the main part of the drinking experience, what makes for example one wine different from another, is the smell and texture. Only the materials that evaporate will reach the depth of the nose and the evaporation depends, of course, on the temperature. Red wine, for example, is drunk at room temperature to allow fragrances to reach the nose (whoever formulated the rule meant the warmth of a European room and not a Tel Aviv restaurant balcony on a Sharab day). Accordingly, wines with a richer aroma are served at a higher temperature than light white wines. Overheating will also cause the alcohol in the glass to reach the nerve endings in the nose and stun them, so vodka with a high alcohol content should always be drunk cold. Similarly, "heavy" beers such as Guinness are recommended for drinking at a higher temperature than light and clear beers.

But the experience of drinking or eating is not only taste and smell, the lips, tongue and oral cavity are among the densest areas of our body in the sensors of the sense of touch. This density allows us to chew quickly without biting our tongue to avoid swallowing sharp bones. The trigeminal nerve transmits a great deal of information about the viscosity, roughness, dryness or humidity, and of course the temperature. There are nerve cells that respond to taste and those that respond when the food is cold or hot, viscous or liquid, but also cells that combine the input from several senses, that is, they respond to the combination of sweet and cold food. or salty rough and hot. The information from the bumps on the tongue (salty, sweet, bitter, sour), it turns out, is just one of many components that create what we perceive as the taste of a food or drink. Sensations belonging to the sense of touch, primarily temperature, are an important part of what the brain will ultimately determine as tasty or repulsive. Thus, the temperature also affects the feeling of the "oiliness" of the food: those who try to consume thin cheeses will find interest in a blind tasting study that found that the difference between thin and fat cottage cheese is less noticeable when it is served at 15° compared to 7°. The improvement in the evaluation of the taste of thin cheeses was preserved even when the tasters' noses were sealed so that the effect is not due to the sense of smell. Heating it a few degrees seems to make the texture, viscosity, or stickiness of the diet cheese more like its high-fat sister. The insula - an area of ​​the brain involved in emotions and maintaining physiological stability (homeostasis) weighs this information together with the data of taste, smell and appearance. This is how a food item receives a score in the form of a positive reward that encourages us to consume it. This score, i.e. the degree of subjective enjoyment of the food item, will determine the appetite it will arouse in us and differences between individuals in the reward that the brain gives us for eating affect a tendency to obesity.

But there are those who see all those scholarly determinations of 17° as the "correct" serving temperature for cabernet wine, 10° for chardonnay wine or 8° for champagne as nothing more than a cultural convention. Although we are born with the ability to distinguish between tastes and even like some of them, especially the sweet taste, most of our preference for foods is learned. In an interesting experiment, subjects were asked to give their opinion on three drinks: chicken soup, juice and wine, each cold, lukewarm or hot. As expected, the subjects balked at the idea of ​​cold soup or steaming juice, but when these drinks were served to the subjects with their eyes closed without knowing what drink they were drinking, it turned out that the conventions regarding the correct temperature are not self-evident. If only we had gotten used to it since childhood, the idea of ​​a cold and refreshing chicken soup for Hamsin Day would not have sounded so far-fetched to us. 

Still: is there an optimal temperature for drinks? It is possible that the most significant experiment in the field was conducted not by scientists but by lawyers. In 1992 something happened in the world of coffee: Stella Liebeck A 79-year-old grandmother from New Mexico in the USA bought a cup of coffee at McDonald's, when she removed the lid from the cup the coffee spilled on her legs and caused her severe burns. The McDonald's company was ordered to pay compensation in the amount of 2.7 million dollars (at the end of the litigation, the plaintiff received only 480,000 dollars). This verdict, to which an immortal episode in the series Seinfeld was dedicated (Kramer, of course, in the role of the one who almost gets rich thanks to burning coffee) suddenly changed the temperature of coffee for millions of consumers. Effective extraction of the flavorings into the drink requires a temperature of at least 85° but a temperature of 70° is enough to cause burns. Following the sentence, the serving temperature of the coffee dropped at once by about 20 degrees. It turns out that coffee consumers have gotten used to the change nicely, in a study conducted a few years after the Liebeck verdict, volunteers were served cups of coffee at different temperatures and they were asked to give their opinion on the temperature of the drink. As expected, the majority of those surveyed ranked the correct temperature from a safety (and legal) point of view, 68°, as the most suitable for sipping and preferred it over what is considered correct in the eyes of coffee experts. It is interesting to note that in order to carry out the study, the researchers had to sign the subjects on a detailed document removing responsibility from the university for injuries from coffee if, God forbid, it spills on any of the sippers.

Did an interesting, intriguing, strange, delusional or funny question occur to you? sent to ysorek@gmail.com

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• At Tel Aviv University they are trying to grow chicken breast in culture
• The taste of life - the taste of carbon dioxide
• Discovery of Prehistoric Baby Bottles Shows Babies Were Fed Cow's Milk 5,000 Years Ago
• Archaeological evidence reveals: the beginning of the industrial breeding of chickens - in Israel 2,300 years ago
• Things that Yoram knows: the clean world of our ancestors