Why the Color of Your Mug Can Make Your Coffee Taste Better

Brunch just got a little bit more interesting.

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If you’re like me, then you center your life around food. I think about my next meal, what I’m going to cook this weekend, or what restaurant dishes I want to try almost twenty-four seven, and the end goal of it all is just to taste something good. Of course, there are other parts of eating and drinking that are wonderful — you can create memories with friends, admire the impeccable interior design of a particular establishment, or get tipsy and text an ex from the bathroom. But at the center of it all, is taste, which is why it’s worth asking: If you could change the way you taste and find new pathways to appreciate what’s on your plate, wouldn’t you want to? In her new book How To Taste: A Guide to Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life, Mandy Naglich breaks down what taste is, and how you can fine tune your tasting abilities.

With certifications in beer, wine, and cheese tasting, Naglich is (literally) an expert on identifying flavors and describing what she detects on her palate. Her recent release draws on this expertise, thorough research aided by her background as a journalist, and interviews with everyone from scientists to sommeliers to decode pretty much everything about taste. Naglich’s goal with How to Taste is to help you become a more active taster, someone who thinks about the way they savor anything on their tongue. Read on to find a few fascinating tidbits I learned about the factors that underlie how we taste, and where they can be applied to your regular life.

The number one takeaway you’ll find from Naglich’s book is that the way something tastes to you isn’t just dependent on what’s physically on your tongue. Taste is multisensory; What you touch, see, smell, and hear can all impact the flavor you perceive. This means that the colors used for wallpaper, interior decor, plateware, and more can all help shape taste. Studies on the associations between color and taste reveal that people tend to link certain colors with certain flavors; For example, red is usually connected with sweetness, while green is considered more sour. Although sourness isn’t an attribute we necessarily seek in many foods, it is a large part of what gives coffee its flavor and depth. So, if you drink coffee from a green mug, you might perceive it to be more complex and sour, and it might taste better to you.

Have you ever noticed that your skin, nose, and eyes feel super dry after you fly on an airplane? This is because, as Naglich points out, the air on planes is so dry that it actually has a lower humidity than the Mojave desert. Unfortunately, this means your nose will have less mucus after a flight, and mucus is important for helping bind the particles of food that we interpret as smells to the olfactory receptors in our noses. Simply put: When your nasal passages are dry, it’s harder to smell, and because scent is actually responsible for roughly 80% of what we taste, it’s also harder to taste. This means that when you’re on an airplane, the food will be more bland no matter how good it is!

Luckily there’s a simple fix to help you appreciate all that poke once you land in Hawaii, or plates of arancini in Sicily. Naglich recommends drinking a lot of water and packing a travel humidifier — just start blasting it as soon as you arrive at your hotel room — when you fly, to help replenish your mucus supply more quickly. This will allow you to replenish your tasting powers more quickly after you get off a plane.

Naglich dives deep into basic tastes like salty, sour, sweet, bitter, and umami, as well as how they can affect one another when combined. She points out that saltiness can suppress bitterness. (If you want to test this for yourself, a chef once taught me to try eating a radicchio leaf both with and without salt sprinkled on it. It’s pretty clear that it tastes less bitter once seasoned.) A mustard expert that Naglich consulted for her book explains that the sour, slightly bitter flavors in the condiment can help intensify the cocoa flavor in brownies, and make it seem more rich. This might sound strange, but it’s the same principle that leads to many chocolate cake recipes including a little bit of coffee.

How to Taste will arm you with a better understanding of what factors contribute to a sense of taste, familiarity with how different flavors go together, a mix of excellent fun facts you can whip out at parties, and more. But the most exciting part of Naglich’s work is that she also breaks down how to apply these findings to everyday life, so you can make your world taste a lot better.