Palate

From Beer

When it comes to food and drink, the palate refers to the taste or flavor. It can also refer to the way an individual experiences taste.

The unsophisticated modern palate is dulled by constant consumption of the sweet, sour, and salty tastes, and almost completely unfamiliar with the bitter, astringent, and pungent flavors. In auyervedic medicine, bringing the diet into balance is accomplished by blending all six flavors into meals, thereby reducing cravings and increasing the nutritional content. As you introduce whole foods into the diet, the msg, high fructose corn syrup, and other additives in processed food become less appealing, and your taste buds start to be more discerning and accepting of many more flavors.

With each type of alcoholic product, there are those who are looking for quantity, not quality, and they actually acquire a taste for the bland sort of products. Without mentioning brand names, suffice to say that the beers that come in 30-packs, and wine that comes in gigantic jugs, are not likely to have enjoyable flavor, let alone complexity. It has become something of an American stereotype to prefer intensity and quantity over sublety and quality, in terms of food and drink, and in pop culture and consumerism as well.

Similarly, if one is used to very bland drinks, some of the more complex ales will not be appealing at first, but once you become accustomed to a better quality of beer, you find that you can enjoy a much more interesting taste sensation when drinking beer. Fortunately we live in a time where the craft breweries and microbreweries are offering an unprecedented variety of great ales which are almost limitless in their flavors, alcohol content, and degrees of robustness. The difference in what it's like to taste really fine ale, as compared to agreeable-enough cheap beer, is somewhat analagous to hearing the rich sound of a musical chord rather than just hearing the pitch of one note. Try New Glarus's Enigma (a.k.a "unplugged") while it's still available, and notice how different it is from any other cherry-influenced drink you've ever had, and that will convey my message better than my words ever could.