[All About Bitters (Part 2)]

sort of like "halo dumping" but not quite because as stated up thread by one of the language dictators, you cannot/should not use the word that way.

I'm not being a "language dictator", you were using it wrong. At least try to understand the science you spout before calling out others.

Halo-dumping related only to laboratory testing. It relates to the narrowing of rating criteria to just one or two simple criteria. It's like asking someone this question:

What does beef stew taste like? (Pick one)

A) Sweet

B) Salty

C) Sour

D) Bitter

E) Umami

THAT'S halo-dumping. It's forcing a participant to choose based on broad strokes. And EVERY participant can only choose based on those criteria. No matter how experienced the taster is, that's all they can pick.

However, you're using it in a situation where it doesn't work. At all. As I said before, the more experience (i.e. how much a person has tasted in his or her lifetime) IS the judging criteria. It is safe to say that a 4 year old knows less about food than a 50 year old, yes? Therefore, if you ask a child to describe a beef stew with a buttered roll, it'll taste like beef, bread and butter, won't it? But to someone with experience, it'll taste like meat, fat, rosemary, thyme, earthy potato, sweet carrots, toasted grains, cream, salt. For the 4 year old, THAT'S the equivalent of real life halo-dumping. The child doesn't know so it just lumps everything into broad categories. Someone with more experience doesn't do that. Thus, no real life halo-dumping. This means that not all participants in your "test" of a cocktail are bound by the same criteria. Therefore, not halo-dumping. It's merely inexperience.

[All About Bitters (Part 2)]

it is an analogy hence it gets a prefix. i've heard a thousand people say a wine fermented to dryness was sweet. i've heard a thousand people ask for a less sweet dry wine only to favor a wine with a different sort of aroma. what can we infer about the language they select?

based on my library of experiences i could probably smell something raw and un-abstracted and tell you if it was going to be bitter or not. it would be based on a similar experience.

if you believe in synesthesia you could indeed potentially feel the sensation of gustatory bitterness from an aroma. my olfactory construct does not claim anything is a one for one trade of sensations but it is basically the closest sensory analogy we have.

What we can infer about their language is that what you're supposedly discussing from the paper works. Obviously if the wine is "fermented to dryness" then this means that the aroma profile of the wine is causing the taster to view the wine as sweet. A wine with heavy fruit flavors (berries, cherries, apple, pear, melon, etc) will obviously taste sweeter since, as per the article, it is commonly linked with the intake of a sucrose/sugar. The people that favor a wine with a different aroma obviously found one that wasn't as robust on fruit aromas and, therefore, the wine did not appear as sweet.

what technical name would we give the common phenomenon of cocktail/wine tasters labeling acidic experiences as bitter because they do not have the vocabulary to call it acidic? discussion of a cocktail experience seems like it can be similar to a blind test because the inputs are often just vague symbols to the imbibers.

Inexperience. Halo-dumping illustrates that ALL participants in the experiment have trouble fully expressing flavors based on the criteria given to them. The criteria given to them is their own experience. Those with more experience will obviously suffer from less halo-dumping as they have the levels of depth required to adequately describe what they're tasting. It'd be the same thing as putting out 10 bottles of scotch with varying peat levels. To someone unfamiliar with peated scotch, they'll all just taste like smoke. But to someone that's been drinking scotch for twenty years, each scotch will have different characteristics to the peat reek.

my olfactory construct makes no claim that gustation is being stimulated by aromas. the brain does not receive straight forward gustatory sweetness from these aromas, rather it could be said it receives something like it based on our past experiences. gustatory sweetness only becomes the closest analogy we have and therefore influences our language decisions.

So you're saying that tastes AREN't stimulated by aromas? That goes completely contradictory to paper you cited. Other than that, yes, I believe you're right.

it seems like we could create some sort of gustatory analogy to describe how angelica can suppress sweetness and when we identify other aromas that also suppress sweetness we could do the same.

We could.

Overall, I still think you're confused here. And for the benefit of everyone reading, could you dumb down your words? I had to do a Google search of "olfactory construct" and the only website that came up with that phrase was yours. So that didn't help much.

[All About Bitters (Part 2)]

the idea of describing one sense in terms of another is not a crazy idea. we do have commonly accepted analogies like "warm & cool" colors after all. we also have synesthesia & synesthetes and growing amounts of research on the topic... there is tons of research that examines "sweetness enhancement" in food where aromas increase or decrease the perception of sweetness. we also have multi sensory amplification where things like salt change the threshold of perception of aromas. lots of people are studying it.

I'm pretty sure this is the only thing correct you've said to this point. Not to rag on you but you're seriously putting across some bad information here. I'd like to correct you, if possible.

one of the tricky aspects of talking about flavor and its numerous divisions is that we cannot just say "bitter" or "sweet", we have to specify gustatory bitterness or olfactory bitterness. we cannot assume that all language defaults to gustation. this is particularly important to understanding the language attached to things like dry wines.

There is no such thing as "olfactory bitterness." Bitterness is purely a taste, and a hereditary one at that. So unless you've evolved to smell poisons, you can't "smell" something bitter.

another thing about "bitters" is that the term "bitter" is a "halo dumping" catch all for gustatory and olfactory divisions that decrease the perception of sweetness.

it is very common to hear people say something is too "bitter" when it is actually too "acidic". this phenomenon of mislabeling things as "bitter" is discussed in Auvray & Spence's paper "the multisensory perception of flavor

the olfactory division part assumes that you can categorize all aromas in terms of gustation (and i don't think i'm the only person that uses the olfaction into gustation "olfactory construct"). it is easy to identify olfactory sweetness and umami, but it is very difficult to break down the other olfactory divisions so they often get lumped with "bitter".

You can't really use the term halo-dumping in this situation. Halo-dumping primarily refers to scientific analysis. In the paper, it goes on to say that

"‘Halo-dumping’ can occur whenever the appropriate response alternative for a salient attribute is unavailable to participants. This can lead participants to ‘dump’ the values for a salient attribute that is not available in the range of alternative response scales provided (e.g., the strength of a fruity odor) onto one of the other rating attributes that have been provided (e.g., the sweetness of the fruity odor)."

You're not applying any "rating attributes". It's a cocktail, not a double blind test.

But the more glaring error here is the last part which runs completely contrary to the article you posted. There is no such thing as "olfactory sweetness" either. Sweetness is a taste, just like bitterness. Any apparent "sweet smell" isn't because you can smell sweetness, it's because exposure to a smell is linked with the taste of sweetness. In your paper it states:

"When ‘sweet’ odors, which in themselves possess no taste (they cannot be detected by the taste receptors) are added as flavorings to solutions that participants have to taste, they tend to increase the perceived sweetness of those solutions (Cliff & Noble, 1990; Frank & Byram, 1988; Frank, Shaffer, & Smith, 1991; Schifferstein & Verlegh, 1996). For example, when caramel odor is added to a sucrose solution, the taste of the resulting mixture is perceived as being sweeter than the pure sucrose solution when presented by itself; and conversely, adding a caramel odor has also been shown to suppress the sourness of solutions containing citric acid (see Stevenson et al., 1999). The reverse phenomenon, sweetness suppression, has also been documented. For example, certain odors, such as angelica oil, have been reported to reduce the perceived sweetness of a sucrose solution to which they have been added as a flavoring (Stevenson et al., 1999). The odors that typically induce sweet tastes appear to be related to previous instances of co-exposure with a sweet taste, such as might naturally occur during eating (e.g., Prescott, 2004; Stevenson, Prescott, & Boakes, 1995; Stevenson, Boakes, & Prescott, 1998). For example, the odors of vanilla, caramel, strawberry, and mint induce sweetness enhancement in western countries where people often experience those odors with sucrose. On the other hand, non-western participants do not describe some of these odors as sweet, probably due to a less frequent pairing of these odors with sweetness in their food culture."

There is no sweet smell. The only reason something smells sweet is because it's been linked with a sweet taste.

It seems to me that you're getting highly confused by the paper. You have some portions of it right but are also confusing the heck out of the others. The paper you presented mainly goes about linking taste and smell and how affecting the aroma of a product can also affect the taste. The paper talks about using fragrances such as caramel, mint, strawberry, vanilla in aroma form (without flavor whatsoever) to improve the sweetness of a drink. Alternatively, using an aroma such as angelica can suppress the sweetness of a drink. This is the role of bitters and amaro. The basic idea behind a bitter/amaro is that there is a bittering agent that is either enhanced or suppressed by the other aromatics added to the tincture. By focusing on aromas that suppress sweetness, you make a tincture more bitter and vice versa. This is why there is such a broad range of bitters/amaro. Some are extremely bitter, some not so much, and some are rather sweet. It all has to do with the other herbs used along with the bittering agent to either squash or highlight the sweetness of the sugar it uses.