Saturday, October 6, 2007

Balsamic Vinegar + Beer

I didn't even realize that the first Friday of the month was coming up, so I missed out on the The Session #8 which was about beer and food. However, this last week while listening to some old Craft Beer Radio podcasts I noticed something interesting that is semi-related. In show #70 titled "Stouts" they talk about a study that was done where bar patrons were blindly poured two of the same beers, but one with balsamic vinegar added. What they found was that the majority of people liked the one with the vinegar more. The reason I find this more interesting than I normally would is because when I was in Santa Rosa a couple months ago I was talking to the owner of a bar that carries a lot of Moonlight beers. We were talking about the special brown ale Moonlight tap they were carrying that day (which my friend had ordered a glass of). He gave us a more or less "secret" tip, saying that it becomes even better when you get a light coating of balsamic vinegar on a spoon and dip the spoon into the brown ale. Apparently this tip even came from the man who creates these beers. It sounds interesting, so if you're on 4th street in Santa Rosa stop in at The Flavor Bistro and see if they have the brown ale on tap along with their other standard Moonlight taps, or try it on any old brown ale and see what you think.

1 comment:

Leo said...

If you'd like to read more about the balsamic vinegar in beer experiment, check out "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely. It was his experiment at MIT. He found that beer drinkers liked the balsamic vinegar, but only if they weren't told what it was before consuming.