10 May 2013 Why beer and savoury snacks are a classic combination
Why do bars serve nuts or crisps or biltong? To make you thirsty so you’ll drink more beer? Yes, but that’s only half right – fatty-salty snacks actually make beer easier to swallow.
Scientists at Philadelphia’s University City’s Monell Chemical Senses Center say beer and savoury snacks are a classic pairing, but not because snacks make you thirsty.
“First, remember that beer is not soda or juice – it’s an adult beverage with complex, often-challenging flavours. One of those flavours is bitterness, a product of the hops that are added to balance the sweetness of beer’s malt,” notes Marcia Pelchat, a Monell associate member who specialises in the mechanics of food cravings.
“Human beings detect bitterness as an unpleasant sensation, a genetic protection against swallowing dangerous toxins. For reasons that aren’t completely clear, the taste of bitterness is countered by sodium chloride – good, old table salt. Somehow salt blocks the molecules that create bitterness.”
But it takes more than just the salt for beer to go down easy, for there’s another ingredient that challenges the mouth: tannic acid.
Tannins are a by-product of the brewing process, but they have no real flavour. Rather, tannic acid creates the sensation of astringency by binding the lubricating proteins in saliva and drying the surface of the mouth. That astringency enhances other flavours in beer.
And what counteracts astringency? Fat. It relubricates the mouth.
Beer aromas may also affect people’s like or dislike of certain beers – after all, our sense of aroma is 10,000 times greater than our sense of taste, and our sensitivity to certain aromas varies.
For example, some people are particularly sensitive to diacetyl, another by-product of the brewing process. It smells like the fake butter in microwave popcorn, and it’s especially noticeable in British pale ales. Others may not notice it at all.
Cheers! Here’s to a mug of brew in one hand and a fistful of fat and salt in the other!