Health & Medicine
Smell, Taste and Flavor of a Whisky Depends on Environment
Benita Matilda
First Posted: Oct 11, 2013 10:03 AM EDT
A new study by researchers at University of Oxford states that manipulating a person's senses with environmental cues can significantly alter the taste of whisky.
The study published in the journal Flavour, found that participants' rating of the smell, taste and flavour of whisky changed depending on the environment.
The study was led by Charles Spence, Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, and sound designers Condiment Junkie.
The researchers conducted an experiment to check how change in environment affected the taste of their whisky. They conducted a whisky tasting experiment in which the participants were asked to taste a sample of whisky in three different rooms.
Each room has a unique fragrance, feel, visual appearance and sound. All the three rooms were designed in a different manner to emphasize a different attribute to whisky. The researchers checked how the participant's perception was influenced by the three different environment i.e. woodiness, sweetness and grassiness.
The room with a feel of grassiness had a turf floor and soundscape of summer meadow. The room with woodiness had a fragrance of cedarwood and tonka bean and soundscape of a creaking timber, log fire and wood instruments.
The researchers noticed the in the grassier room the participants perceived whisky as gassier, sweeter in the sweet room and woodier in the woody room. Between all the three rooms, the participants rating changed by almost 20 percent.
"These results suggest that, even under realistic and noisy conditions, a change of the multisensory environment in which people drink can give rise to a very real change in their experience. They help to highlight the potential opportunity that may be associated with the design multisensory environments for complex food or drink products," said Charles Spence, co-author of the paper.
Apart from environmental factors even the size and shape of the glass matters. A recent study had found that the shape of the wine glass plays a key role in how much alcohol you consume. The amount wine a person pours depends on the type of wine and glass design.
See Now:
NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone
©2024 ScienceWorldReport.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The window to the world of science news.
More on SCIENCEwr
First Posted: Oct 11, 2013 10:03 AM EDT
A new study by researchers at University of Oxford states that manipulating a person's senses with environmental cues can significantly alter the taste of whisky.
The study published in the journal Flavour, found that participants' rating of the smell, taste and flavour of whisky changed depending on the environment.
The study was led by Charles Spence, Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, and sound designers Condiment Junkie.
The researchers conducted an experiment to check how change in environment affected the taste of their whisky. They conducted a whisky tasting experiment in which the participants were asked to taste a sample of whisky in three different rooms.
Each room has a unique fragrance, feel, visual appearance and sound. All the three rooms were designed in a different manner to emphasize a different attribute to whisky. The researchers checked how the participant's perception was influenced by the three different environment i.e. woodiness, sweetness and grassiness.
The room with a feel of grassiness had a turf floor and soundscape of summer meadow. The room with woodiness had a fragrance of cedarwood and tonka bean and soundscape of a creaking timber, log fire and wood instruments.
The researchers noticed the in the grassier room the participants perceived whisky as gassier, sweeter in the sweet room and woodier in the woody room. Between all the three rooms, the participants rating changed by almost 20 percent.
"These results suggest that, even under realistic and noisy conditions, a change of the multisensory environment in which people drink can give rise to a very real change in their experience. They help to highlight the potential opportunity that may be associated with the design multisensory environments for complex food or drink products," said Charles Spence, co-author of the paper.
Apart from environmental factors even the size and shape of the glass matters. A recent study had found that the shape of the wine glass plays a key role in how much alcohol you consume. The amount wine a person pours depends on the type of wine and glass design.
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone