This is all just pure speculation on my part, but it seems likely to me that drinking alcoholic beverages conditions us to like the taste after we’ve learned to associate the taste with the relaxation/intoxication effect. After a long enough learning period, we do come to like the taste, but the underlying reason would be the taste-effect link.
In fact, there’s a much better example of a similar process, namely smoking cigarettes. I think it’s pretty much undeniable that objectively the taste of cigarette smoke is bad. Almost every smoker remembers that the taste of cigarette was awful at the beginning. And certainly all non-smokers who have tasted cigarette can attest to this. Also, those that have quit smoking and started it again, almost always report that smoking tastes bad for a while.
But smokers eventually learn to like the taste of cigarette and it’s very likely that this is only because our brains learn to associate the taste with the quick and effective rush that the nicotine gives.
I would suggest that similar learning process is going on with drinking alcohol. The learning isn’t quite as effective as it is with smoking, because the effect isn’t so fast, but it’s effectively the same mechanism.
There’s also the hypothesis that something similar is going on with learning to like flavors in food. An idea that is put forward at least by Seth Roberts. We learn to like flavors because of their association with calories they give. (With sugar being the odd exception that tastes good to us without any learning process.)
If all this is true—that you learn to like the taste of alcohol because of this type of (unconscious!) associative learning—I don’t know what it implies about SilasBarta’s claim. Because in a way, the taste will become good given that you’ve trained your brains to like it. But for anyone tasting a certain flavor of alcohol for first time, the taste will certainly be dominantly bad. (Unless it’s some sort of candy drink, that mostly hides the taste of alcohol itself.)
This is all just pure speculation on my part, but it seems likely to me that drinking alcoholic beverages conditions us to like the taste after we’ve learned to associate the taste with the relaxation/intoxication effect. After a long enough learning period, we do come to like the taste, but the underlying reason would be the taste-effect link.
In fact, there’s a much better example of a similar process, namely smoking cigarettes. I think it’s pretty much undeniable that objectively the taste of cigarette smoke is bad. Almost every smoker remembers that the taste of cigarette was awful at the beginning. And certainly all non-smokers who have tasted cigarette can attest to this. Also, those that have quit smoking and started it again, almost always report that smoking tastes bad for a while.
But smokers eventually learn to like the taste of cigarette and it’s very likely that this is only because our brains learn to associate the taste with the quick and effective rush that the nicotine gives.
I would suggest that similar learning process is going on with drinking alcohol. The learning isn’t quite as effective as it is with smoking, because the effect isn’t so fast, but it’s effectively the same mechanism.
There’s also the hypothesis that something similar is going on with learning to like flavors in food. An idea that is put forward at least by Seth Roberts. We learn to like flavors because of their association with calories they give. (With sugar being the odd exception that tastes good to us without any learning process.)
If all this is true—that you learn to like the taste of alcohol because of this type of (unconscious!) associative learning—I don’t know what it implies about SilasBarta’s claim. Because in a way, the taste will become good given that you’ve trained your brains to like it. But for anyone tasting a certain flavor of alcohol for first time, the taste will certainly be dominantly bad. (Unless it’s some sort of candy drink, that mostly hides the taste of alcohol itself.)