If you can’t function without your morning cafetiere, and your Starbucks loyalty card is permanently stamped, you’re clearly a fan of the bitter taste of coffee. But have you ever wondered why? It turns out that coffee lovers share a common trait…
The more sensitive you are to coffee’s bitter taste, the more you’ll drink, according to a new study. Technically, we shouldn’t enjoy the breakfast beverage at all, as historically bitter tastes are meant to alter us to danger, but given that UK residents drink 70 million cups per day, that clearly hasn’t stopped us!
“You’d expect that people who are particularly sensitive to the bitter taste of caffeine would drink less coffee,” said Marilyn Cornelis, from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “The opposite results of our study suggest coffee consumers acquire a taste or an ability to detect caffeine due to the learned positive reinforcement (i.e. stimulation) elicited by caffeine.”
Why does coffee taste bitter?
The way coffee tastes to us is down to genetics, and the more heightened your ability to detect its bitterness, the more you’ll slurp it down, according to Northwestern University in Australia.
Interestingly though, people who were sensitive to a different type of bitterness (the flavours of quinine and PROP, a synthetic taste) avoided coffee, and often tended to drink less red wine too.
Participants who drank a lot of coffee tending to drink very small amounts of tea – but researchers admitted that this could just be because they always have their hands full with coffee!
