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Introduction to Proof: The Science of Booze

Proof: The Science of Booze is a book you must read if you want to understand the relationship between humans and booze. I recommend this book if you want to find out about its history and connection with civilization. Providing facts and knowledge backed by modern science to explain booze. Learn how innovations improve booze, and how booze helped science and technology advance. Although the author writes in his afterword that he didn’t intend to write about history I’m glad he did! This book opens your eyes and broadens your view on alcohol and booze. It will take your tasting experiences to the next level. You will become a better professional drinker.

Writing style

The author shares his journey studying booze with an attractive storytelling style. He shares his experiences with experts and explains discoveries in an engaging way. You are waiting to discover his next adventure which will reveal more findings. It is different from the way Goldratt wrote his book The Goal. There a fictive manager works at a fictive factory and gets help from a fictive professor to find real solutions for real problems. Unlike The Phoenix Project, which was inspired by Goldratt's work, this book doesn't have fictive elements. This book describes the author's journey to knowledge.

Although the writing style can be a bit difficult it is still legible. Basic knowledge of science together with a strong interest in alcohol is all you need. You don’t need to understand everything, so you can read over the difficult parts. But sometimes there will be interesting stuff and there is no shame in looking it up. It’ll give you the opportunity to learn about your topic of interest. In this way, I have deepened my knowledge about yeast and fermentation. For example, the type of yeast has a major influence on the flavor! Things I didn’t realize that would be interesting at all for me turned out to be useful.

Key take-outs

Here are some key take-outs from Proof: The Science of Booze. Did you know that:

• Yeast is key in making booze, it converts sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide
• Yeast is a single-celled organism, it's neither plant nor animal, neither bacteria nor virus, it's a fungus
• Yeast is the first creature to have its genome sequenced
• Alcohol gets absorbed better when injected into the intestines, imagine how this study was performed…
• Hangovers are still a mystery, and nobody has a cure for it
• Distillation was discovered over 2000 years back
• Scientists and Engineer discovered many things while studying alcohol
• There is a lot of research done on booze, not with (that's for philosophers )
• Scientists disagree if it is possible to discover the smell and taste of drinks…

Science of Flavors

I'm particularly interested in the chapter on smell and tasting which you might have already suspected . It gave me an opportunity to reflect on my ambitions for the Data-driven Tasting Experience. This gave me the inspiration to continue my journey to get insights out of tastings from the crowd. Tasting is personal and different factors influence flavors.

Factors like environment, setting, temperature, and color of light have an influence. The example where he meets a master sommelier makes it clear that the crowd's opinion on tasting does matter. It discussed the difference between an experienced sommelier and an amateur in blind tastings. Here the sommelier will do slightly better in identifying drinks than an amateur drinker. A blind tasting is when you don’t see what you drink, including the color. The difference is in the taster’s experience. Expertise is determined by knowing how to describe a drink and remember it based on experience. Sommeliers get training to describe drinks and a good one has tasted a lot and stored it in his or her memory.

Some facts from the book The Science of Booze, did you know that:

• During a study of blind smelling odors, amateur drinkers got on average 7.5 out of 10 odors right and pros got 8.6 out of 10 right
• Power of suggestion plays a role in the tasting, you will taste what others suggest or because you already know your drink
• Our senses are limited, we can smell a single flavor excellent, but it becomes hard when we mix flavors
• The shape, size, and visuals of the glass influence your taste
• The color of your drink influences your taste
• Study shows that adding tasteless artificial colors makes the drink taste different
• Taste and smell aren't well-defined and they're hard to describe
• Professor Noble invented a flavor map, the Noble Wine Aroma Wheel to describe flavor easier and faster for her research
• Tasting gets influenced by your environment or setting, your wine tasted so much better at the vineyard on your holiday...
• A flavor smells or tastes like something, but it doesn't mean it's in there
• When you taste, you remember a flavor that is stored in your memory, and your brain links to it
• Everyone tastes different, a drink can taste fantastic to one person but shitty to another.

Conclusions from Proof: The Science of Booze

To conclude, I have learned that a lot is unknown in this area. Scientists are still figuring out how it works. We do make alcohol but important parts we don't understand:

• We are still figuring out about yeast and fermentation
• We try to understand aging
• We do our best to understand how our tasting works
• Every day we learn more about the influences of alcohol on the human body
• There is a world to discover to understand and cure hangovers.

Isn't it surprising that we know so less considering our relationship with booze? Humans have made and consumed alcohol since the beginning of civilization! People even claim that civilization started with alcohol. Stored fruit started to ferment and humans wanted to settle because that drink gave joy.

Get your tasting experience to the next level

According to me, you'll get your best tasting experience when using all your senses:

• Vision
• look at the color, viscosity, and/or foam layer of the drink
• Hearing
• listen to the sound of opening the bottle and pouring, for sparkling drinks listen to the bubbles
• Smell
• use your nose to discover smells
• Touch
• feel the viscosity or bubbles with your tongue and mouth
• Taste
• determine what it taste is like and describe it

Remember, drink to taste, not to get drunk! Once you've read this book you will definitely appreciate your drink more! Science, experimenting, engineering, and dedication, there is so much more behind your next sip.

Improved with Tasting Intelligence

I want to share best practices with you so you can write your own online content like tasing revies and more. Write focussed and readable for your target audience. Your point should be clear. Make sure your reader gets value from your online content and doesn't get lost while reading. This will also improve your SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

It can be hard to come up with a summary that highlights your text. Especially when the number of words are limited like for the excerpt used in SEO. I have used the Dashboard for Bloggers and Writers the help me with my summary and to find the keywords. I have finished it by hand to make it a running sentence. I have used selected keywords in my meta description as (focus) keywords.

The summarizing tool scans the text and gives the sentences that it calculated as most important. It does the same with the keywords. This is how some search engines also look at the text.

Based on the input text the software generates word clouds, which can also be in my own logo. I have used those to cheer up my content.

find more info⟶

Other helpfull software which I have used to improve my writing include:

• Hemingway Editor
• Slickwrite
• Grammarly
• Lsigraph
• Thesaurus
• The idioms
• Words to Use