Coffee knowledge thinks coffee is not good? Then change the cup.

Have you ever had such an experience in life that the same coffee tastes different today and yesterday? What would you do at this time? Pour it out and make a new cup? Or two more sugars? In fact, maybe you just need to change a cup.

Recently, Australian researchers have found that drinking coffee with different cups can give people different perceptions of the taste of coffee. The study was published in the journal flavour.

In this study, the researchers designed two groups of experiments to investigate the effect of cups on subjects' perception of coffee taste.

George van Dornder (George H Van Doorn), a health and psychology researcher at the Australian Commonwealth University, was surprised to learn in a chat with a barista that holding coffee in a white ceramic cup would be more bitter than a transparent glass cup. To confirm this claim, he recruited 18 volunteers to do the first experiment.

In the first experiment, the researchers placed lattes in three different cups: a white ceramic cup, a transparent glass cup and a blue mug. The experimenters believe that from the perspective of color psychology, if a white opaque cup makes coffee feel more bitter, then blue, as a complementary color of coffee, will make the coffee look darker and may have the same effect. So he chose transparent, white and blue cups to carry out the experiment.

Three kinds of cups used by the researchers in the first experiment. Photo Source: research papers

The subjects drank 200 milliliters of lattes in one of the cups in a group of six, and then rated the taste and aroma of the coffee. The results show that the white ceramic cup does make people feel that the coffee in the cup is more rich.

The results show that white cups give subjects a stronger sense of perception. Photo Source: research papers

But does this effect on the sensory taste of coffee have anything to do with the shape of the cup? Would it be unreliable to have a test of only 18 people? To eliminate this effect, in the second experiment, the researchers chose cups that were the same except for different colors (white, transparent, blue) and expanded the number of participants to 36. The results showed that the coffee in the blue and transparent cups still tasted sweeter than the white ones.

In the second experiment, the researchers used three kinds of cups. Photo Source: research papers

The results show that people who use blue and transparent cups and coffee taste sweeter than white cups, but they actually drink the same baristas. Photo Source: research papers

Through experiments, the researchers believe that the color of the cup does affect people's perception of the taste of coffee. Two studies have shown that white cups can indeed make coffee in white cups "more bitter" by changing the color contrast between coffee and cups.

This experiment shows that people's taste perception of a food or drink is often a combination of multiple senses, so the researchers suggest that cafe owners, baristas and pottery manufacturers should carefully consider the color of the cup. and the potential effect its color may have on the drink to give people more taste experience.