It’s been a while since I posted about one of life’s great pleasures, coffee. In particular, I’m currently mining why the bitter flavor is so inviting.

Before you roll your eyes, I’m fully aware that caffeine is a drug and one that I have a loving relationship with. It’s classified as such because it stimulates the central nervous system, causing increased alertness. That explains my love affair. Our country is addicted because it gives most people a temporary energy boost and elevates moods.

Back to the taste. If you’ve been following the blog, you know I’m in Mammoth, California with my teenagers and their friends. I brought my grinder, French press and beans with me. However, I found Black Velvet Coffee here, an espresso bar serving deliciousness by the cup.  I wouldn’t be true to you, the readers, if I didn’t sample a bit. I stopped in and bought a bag of Serra Negra from Brazil. The cup was exquisite, with chocolaty notes and a super clean finish. However, like all black coffee, it was bitter. I love the bitterness. Why? The answer is sort of scientific. From jjgoode.com:

Linda Bartoshuk, a professor at Yale University’s Medical School whose research focuses on the sense of taste explains that we might very well avoid these foods if only the basic taste system were at work. Smell, however, contributes considerably to what we think of as flavor. Bartoshuk explains that when black coffee enters your mouth, you perceive bitterness with your tongue, but you also perceive a complex coffee odor with your nose as the java molecules are pumped from your mouth into your nasal cavity (appetizing, huh?). Positive and negative responses to smells are learned, not visceral. And with coffee, it seems, these preferences override our preprogrammed distaste for bitterness.

Exactly. It’s the smells. My son, Dane, is thirteen years old and loves the aroma of freshly ground beans. Whenever I grind for my press, he leans in for a long inhale. I’m not sure if he will ultimately become a coffee drinker, but I’m sure our time together will push him in that general direction. My wish, of course, is that he learns to drink it black, in moderate quantities and as an adult to derive coffee’s many health benefits. It’s possible that he takes the route, like most Americans, of starting with cream and sugar, although I hope he skips that step.

Although she insists that she can only speculate, because comprehensive empirical evidence on the specific subject doesn’t exist, she believes that people like coffee because its smell becomes associated with its accompanying rush of caffeine and pleasures of cream and sugar. Enough instances of this pairing, and many people come to crave unadulterated coffee.

Yup, that’s how it will play out for Dane. Then, in five years, when I’m 44 and he’s 18, we can sit down together over a steaming cup and discuss life.

Dreaming big,

Kap