That fascinated me.

Yeah, so actually the nerves that run from the back of your tongue, so what are carrying your taste signals, you know, your salty, sweet, bitter, umami, and sour, run through your inner ear to your brain.

So anything you're hearing at the time is actually affecting what you taste.

So, you know, I always tell people if you have that really fancy bottle of wine, it's not good to open it in a loud restaurant.

Or if you really want to savor something, you know, having a little bit of quiet and really thinking about it, it actually like physically changes the way that you taste something, what you're interesting.

You know, you talk about even how colors affect how you taste things.

So pink is definitely the strongest one with our tie to sweetness.

Well, now that we've discussed how important it is to taste and smell and listen, would you walk us through some of your seven step tasting process for people to actually learn to

We're moving to number three.

This is gonna be some kind of American.

It's got, like, that, um, really hop forward.

You don't get anything from yeast on it.

Um, it's not quite tropical hops though.

They're a little, like, florally.

Maybe a little forest floor going on.

Well, I gotta say, Mandy, I feel like this is a real loss for the Cicerones.

you're like, seriously? Get this close.

Exactly.

But the great thing is they put you through a lot of training to get to that point, even to miss the certification by one point.

And one of the kind of necessary steps is doing a class called Aroxa.

which is a flavor, flavor chemistry is probably the wrong word, like a tasting certification where you're tasting individual compounds that build beer, but they also do things like coffee, wine, and rocks.

That's not only a beer company, but you're tasting, you know, an individual compound, say something like cis-3-hexanol, and you're learning, oh, this is what green onion and like grass and like those really bright green flavors smell like and then when you really study something like this you're like oh I smell I'm cutting an onion and I smell cis-3-hexanol or oh there's not cis-3-hexanol in this cilantro which you might expect it to be there things like that so I started really opening my eyes up to flavor chemistry in the way that so many things you know what we taste in fermentation all of those esters the fruitiness probably in this black tea has to come from like roasting and the same esters that is coming in fermentation and beer and things like that.

And it actually, I'm so thankful to this course, but it really opened my eyes to the fact that I think tasting notes and things like that are a little, um, I don't know that they're accurate.

So

So I described you a little bit in the intro, but I feel like could you just kind of give us a better picture of what this handle really looks like?

Yeah, so I mean, it, basically it's a woman standing there.

She's wearing a sweater.

She's completely covered.

You know, there's no cleavage or anything, but on where y- her breasts are are two full pints of lager, and it's modeled off of, uh, Ruthie, who used to literally balance two empty glasses on her bosom as a bar owner, fill them completely without touching them, and then actually serve them to her patrons without ever putting her hands around the glass.

So she had quite the, uh, the skill of balance, and she's depicted with those full beers, uh, on the, the tap handle on the label for Ruthie and around Iowa.

Oh.

But the charges never stuck because she wasn't doing anything obscene.