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I never enjoyed shitty coffee. I never enjoyed shitty chocolate or chocolate flavored things like cakes. Until I was 30-something I thought I just didn't like

I never enjoyed shitty coffee. I never enjoyed shitty chocolate or chocolate flavored things like cakes. Until I was 30-something I thought I just didn't like coffee or chocolate. Then one day I had actually proper coffee, and I discovered that good coffee isn't just some imperceptably theoretically better version of regular coffee that snobs are basically just faking being sophisticated for show. They are two entirely different things. Same even more so for chocolate. 99% of chocolate products you come into contact with are garbage. Actual chocolate is like an entirely different product. It's not a better version of the usual thing. I ate it and thought "Oh. Ok THIS must be why chocolate ever became this huge thing in the first place. Hundreds of years ago before all the industrial process and market forces produced all the "chocolate" I ever tasted in my life, what they had was this, actual chocolate. Of course they loved it." To restate the point, I was never happy with the regular version in the first place. I assumed "I don't like coffee" or chocolate, the same way I don't like cigarettes. Turns out I love them both. And it's possible to continue to enjoy the results of having discovered and grown some taste in some area indefinitely without diminishing returns or anything like that. I'm not much of a sweets person so I still don't buy a lot of chocolate or chocolate things like cookies etc, but we have a Trade subscription and get a new and different bag from some random indipendant roaster every 2 or 3 weeks and it's great. I don't love every single bag but I at least find them all interesting and I do love the overall high level of quality basically all the time. I'm not now overall poorer for having discovered good coffee. Life is better. And what else is there?

throwawayffffas 1y ago
> I assumed "I don't like coffee" or chocolate, the same way I don't like cigarettes. So have you tried Cuban cigars?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- Brian_K_White 1y ago
  No, I've tried cigarettes, which is all I needed for that sentence, something I don't like. I guess it's a natural question given the rest, and expensive cigars might indeed be different than cheap cigarrettes, but it's irrelevant, since the point was not that no matter what you don't like you might still like the good version. The point was only that discovering the good version of something did not leave me worse than before because I used to enjoy something abundant and now I can only enjoy something scarce. It's a bit like Feynman on flowers too. You don't have to be ignorant of the biological workings of a flower to appreciate it's mere outward properties exactly the same way as the layperson does. I still love a box mac & cheese even though I thoroughly appreciate far better home or chef made mac & cheese.
locknitpicker 1y ago
> Then one day I had actually proper coffee, and I discovered that good coffee isn't just some imperceptably theoretically better version of regular coffee that snobs are basically just faking being sophisticated for show. They are two entirely different things. I know what you mean, but it's important to be mindful of the fact that enjoying coffee is way more than the quality of the coffee in the cup. I think for most there's a whole ritual around having a coffee which renders the actual coffee a minor detail around everything. You can see this even in coffee brewing snobs, where they use extremely specialized tools and equipment to perform a coffee brewing cerimonies that rival religious ones. Sometimes the coffee itself is just the pretext, but the goal is different.
ehnto 1y ago
Are you from the US by chance? I only ask because specifically for chocolate and coffee, I would consider the US baseline to be exceedingly average, even terrible. Even "okay" chocolate and coffee from other countries better known for food will blow it out of the water. The US does do excellent coffee, and excellent chocolate, but you have to seek it out. In a country like Italy or Australia the default, okay stuff is better. If an Australian couldn't tell the difference between good and great coffee I'd see why.
- Brian_K_White 1y ago
  Yep. nailed it. I agree that at least to my limited vacation experiences, it's not true in say Italy that 99% of chocolate products are garbage.
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    Some of the American chocolate for high volume candy bars is very waxy and not very chocolatey. For example, compare the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to Trader Joe's peanut butter cups [0]. It may be that the Reese's ones used to use better chocolate or it may be that my tastes changed as I grew up. But I used to love them as kids and now they taste off. Similarly for Twix etc. [0] I'm sure other stores sell peanut butter cups too. There's nothing special about the Trader Joe's ones other than they are mass produced and use better chocolate that Reese's. EDIT: Flavor change may be due to cost-saving measures like replacing cocoa butter with vegetable oil https://www.today.com/food/chocoholics-sour-new-hersheys-formula-2d80555560 https://www.today.com/food/chocoholics-sour-new-hersheys-for...
    - Brian_K_White 1y ago
      Most chocolate things, like random chocolate cookies or commercial cake etc, breakfast cereal, irritate the back of my throat in a mild way. Couple that with the foreground taste not being anything special, and it's just enough to make the whole experience just the wrong side of neutral. Not terrible just not good either. All stuff that's made in factories and needs to have shelf life, so I can only imagine it's any number of cost saving substitutions and preservatives and who knows what all for other reasons like preserving texture etc.
leobg 1y ago
Interesting. That chocolate - can you name a product, or give us a link? I think I know what you mean, but one can never be sure.
norome 1y ago
I used to think i didn't like people — Until i met some people I liked. I think it's a bit different from developing taste, what you describe. It's more about finding out who you are. I would say once you know your baseline for what makes chocolate/coffee/etc enjoyable, then taste is about experiencing the nuances within that spectrum. Some people also have a greater tolerance for things that aren't really tasty due to coming up in a culture where things generally taste plain or bad (netherlands and UK come to mind).
yoz-y 1y ago
When chocolate was discovered they consumed it in an extremely different fashion from what we think of good chocolate today. The dried beans were simply cooked with water. Later with milk. Chocolate as we know it only became a thing centuries later. (Dried milk was only invented in 1802, and you can’t make milk chocolate without that for example)
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
  Don't forget the chillies to make Xocolatl
tb8424 1y ago
+1 on this. There's a big difference for some between the 15 dollar whiskey and the 35 dollar whiskey, probably another jump between 35 and 80 dollar whiskey, and then after that it starts getting into crazy marginal gains. If you drink 15 dollar whiskey you'd get 90% of your gains from just bumping it up to 35 versus going straight for the 300 dollar bottle. Same it was with me for coffee, I enjoy single origin vs supermarket coffee, but after that it got to a point where I couldn't realistically make up the difference. There seems to be an 80/20 effect here on how much you should deep-dive into these tangent domains in your life.
- celurian92 1y ago
  can it be like perceiving the value is higher making your taste as good as it is the value of it? can it be a placebo effect?
- ubercore 1y ago
  Once you get into that high end ($100+ whiskeys for instance), I feel like it often doesn't get _better_, it just gets more interesting. People seek out unique flavors or experiences, but you start max out the pure quality aspect.
- Foobar8568 1y ago
  Don't go into the difference between varietals, washing process or fermentation ones. Better, I don't know but there are large differences between producers. I feel it's the same or similar than wine, chocolate etc
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  As in to OP's experience with chocolate, some of this may be down to people being more sensitive to flavors and textures associated with the less expensive manufacturing processes. I, for one, don't like the bite of low quality alcohol. Whisky taken neat starts to be drinkable to me somewhere around $150-$200 a bottle. With ice or water, you can go cheaper than that because you're cutting the harshness of the impurities. There used to be a theory that passing cheap rail alcohol through an activated charcoal filter several times would improve the taste. In my experience with rail vodka, it removes the worst part of the bite from impurities. But it obviously doesn't make it taste like high quality alcohol. I've only tried this with vodka. It may remove some desirable favors from other alcohols.
MangoToupe 1y ago
I mean it's even better to not enjoy things in the first place. You're happier with less.
MisterTea 1y ago
The point of coffee is caffeine. If coffee didn't have caffeine it would be some boring curiosity tucked away in specialty markets. Same with beer, wine, and spirits; it's the alcohol. This is why people still buy Folgers, Pabst, and Night Train: they get the job done for cheap.
- psunavy03 1y ago
  Yeah, this is not true. This is the type of argument that people make when they insist that "no one actually likes IPAs and they just want to get drunk quicker."
  - MisterTea 1y ago
    No, people like IPAs because they taste good to them. I have never heard anyone complementing the flavorings of Pabst (yuk), Schaefer (worst beer I ever tasted), or Milwaukee's Best (aka The Beast). Same with Old English 800 or Colt 45, they're awful but get you drunk for cheap.
    - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
      As a former home brewer, when I taste a ton of hops, the first thing that pops into my mind is "oh they screwed up the batch" because a fistfull of hops was a way to wipe out bad flavors and save material.
      - psunavy03 1y ago
        As a home brewer, just because one person tried to salvage crap by dumping hops into the boil does not automatically make all hoppy styles crap. Perhaps more forgiving for less-experienced brewers, but doing them well still takes skill.
        FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
        It's one of those things so common and spoken about among brew clubs that I saw it as an established truth. We always gave the PNW brewers crap for over reliance on hops. In the time and place I was at, porters and stouts ruled. The hardest thing to brew at home is actually a pale ale or a light lager. You can't hide any mistakes in those because they are 'sex in a canoe' beers.
r0b05 1y ago
Could you point me in the direction of some actual chocolate please
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
  https://valrhona-collection.us/ https://valrhona-collection.us/
ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago
You should try a high quality cigarette!
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
  I miss my Nat Sherman Fantasia's... although I am grateful I was finally able to quit smoking years ago. Thank god for city-wide bans.

throwawayffffas 1y ago

> I assumed "I don't like coffee" or chocolate, the same way I don't like cigarettes. So have you tried Cuban cigars?

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Brian_K_White 1y ago
No, I've tried cigarettes, which is all I needed for that sentence, something I don't like. I guess it's a natural question given the rest, and expensive cigars might indeed be different than cheap cigarrettes, but it's irrelevant, since the point was not that no matter what you don't like you might still like the good version. The point was only that discovering the good version of something did not leave me worse than before because I used to enjoy something abundant and now I can only enjoy something scarce. It's a bit like Feynman on flowers too. You don't have to be ignorant of the biological workings of a flower to appreciate it's mere outward properties exactly the same way as the layperson does. I still love a box mac & cheese even though I thoroughly appreciate far better home or chef made mac & cheese.

locknitpicker 1y ago

> Then one day I had actually proper coffee, and I discovered that good coffee isn't just some imperceptably theoretically better version of regular coffee that snobs are basically just faking being sophisticated for show. They are two entirely different things. I know what you mean, but it's important to be mindful of the fact that enjoying coffee is way more than the quality of the coffee in the cup. I think for most there's a whole ritual around having a coffee which renders the actual coffee a minor detail around everything. You can see this even in coffee brewing snobs, where they use extremely specialized tools and equipment to perform a coffee brewing cerimonies that rival religious ones. Sometimes the coffee itself is just the pretext, but the goal is different.

ehnto 1y ago

Are you from the US by chance? I only ask because specifically for chocolate and coffee, I would consider the US baseline to be exceedingly average, even terrible. Even "okay" chocolate and coffee from other countries better known for food will blow it out of the water. The US does do excellent coffee, and excellent chocolate, but you have to seek it out. In a country like Italy or Australia the default, okay stuff is better. If an Australian couldn't tell the difference between good and great coffee I'd see why.

Brian_K_White 1y ago
Yep. nailed it. I agree that at least to my limited vacation experiences, it's not true in say Italy that 99% of chocolate products are garbage.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  Some of the American chocolate for high volume candy bars is very waxy and not very chocolatey. For example, compare the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to Trader Joe's peanut butter cups [0]. It may be that the Reese's ones used to use better chocolate or it may be that my tastes changed as I grew up. But I used to love them as kids and now they taste off. Similarly for Twix etc. [0] I'm sure other stores sell peanut butter cups too. There's nothing special about the Trader Joe's ones other than they are mass produced and use better chocolate that Reese's. EDIT: Flavor change may be due to cost-saving measures like replacing cocoa butter with vegetable oil https://www.today.com/food/chocoholics-sour-new-hersheys-formula-2d80555560 https://www.today.com/food/chocoholics-sour-new-hersheys-for...
  - Brian_K_White 1y ago
    Most chocolate things, like random chocolate cookies or commercial cake etc, breakfast cereal, irritate the back of my throat in a mild way. Couple that with the foreground taste not being anything special, and it's just enough to make the whole experience just the wrong side of neutral. Not terrible just not good either. All stuff that's made in factories and needs to have shelf life, so I can only imagine it's any number of cost saving substitutions and preservatives and who knows what all for other reasons like preserving texture etc.

leobg 1y ago

Interesting. That chocolate - can you name a product, or give us a link? I think I know what you mean, but one can never be sure.

norome 1y ago

I used to think i didn't like people — Until i met some people I liked. I think it's a bit different from developing taste, what you describe. It's more about finding out who you are. I would say once you know your baseline for what makes chocolate/coffee/etc enjoyable, then taste is about experiencing the nuances within that spectrum. Some people also have a greater tolerance for things that aren't really tasty due to coming up in a culture where things generally taste plain or bad (netherlands and UK come to mind).

yoz-y 1y ago

When chocolate was discovered they consumed it in an extremely different fashion from what we think of good chocolate today. The dried beans were simply cooked with water. Later with milk. Chocolate as we know it only became a thing centuries later. (Dried milk was only invented in 1802, and you can’t make milk chocolate without that for example)

FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
Don't forget the chillies to make Xocolatl

tb8424 1y ago

+1 on this. There's a big difference for some between the 15 dollar whiskey and the 35 dollar whiskey, probably another jump between 35 and 80 dollar whiskey, and then after that it starts getting into crazy marginal gains. If you drink 15 dollar whiskey you'd get 90% of your gains from just bumping it up to 35 versus going straight for the 300 dollar bottle. Same it was with me for coffee, I enjoy single origin vs supermarket coffee, but after that it got to a point where I couldn't realistically make up the difference. There seems to be an 80/20 effect here on how much you should deep-dive into these tangent domains in your life.

celurian92 1y ago
can it be like perceiving the value is higher making your taste as good as it is the value of it? can it be a placebo effect?
ubercore 1y ago
Once you get into that high end ($100+ whiskeys for instance), I feel like it often doesn't get _better_, it just gets more interesting. People seek out unique flavors or experiences, but you start max out the pure quality aspect.
Foobar8568 1y ago
Don't go into the difference between varietals, washing process or fermentation ones. Better, I don't know but there are large differences between producers. I feel it's the same or similar than wine, chocolate etc
ants_everywhere 1y ago
As in to OP's experience with chocolate, some of this may be down to people being more sensitive to flavors and textures associated with the less expensive manufacturing processes. I, for one, don't like the bite of low quality alcohol. Whisky taken neat starts to be drinkable to me somewhere around $150-$200 a bottle. With ice or water, you can go cheaper than that because you're cutting the harshness of the impurities. There used to be a theory that passing cheap rail alcohol through an activated charcoal filter several times would improve the taste. In my experience with rail vodka, it removes the worst part of the bite from impurities. But it obviously doesn't make it taste like high quality alcohol. I've only tried this with vodka. It may remove some desirable favors from other alcohols.

MangoToupe 1y ago

I mean it's even better to not enjoy things in the first place. You're happier with less.

MisterTea 1y ago

The point of coffee is caffeine. If coffee didn't have caffeine it would be some boring curiosity tucked away in specialty markets. Same with beer, wine, and spirits; it's the alcohol. This is why people still buy Folgers, Pabst, and Night Train: they get the job done for cheap.

psunavy03 1y ago
Yeah, this is not true. This is the type of argument that people make when they insist that "no one actually likes IPAs and they just want to get drunk quicker."
- MisterTea 1y ago
  No, people like IPAs because they taste good to them. I have never heard anyone complementing the flavorings of Pabst (yuk), Schaefer (worst beer I ever tasted), or Milwaukee's Best (aka The Beast). Same with Old English 800 or Colt 45, they're awful but get you drunk for cheap.
  - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
    As a former home brewer, when I taste a ton of hops, the first thing that pops into my mind is "oh they screwed up the batch" because a fistfull of hops was a way to wipe out bad flavors and save material.
    - psunavy03 1y ago
      As a home brewer, just because one person tried to salvage crap by dumping hops into the boil does not automatically make all hoppy styles crap. Perhaps more forgiving for less-experienced brewers, but doing them well still takes skill.
      - FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
        It's one of those things so common and spoken about among brew clubs that I saw it as an established truth. We always gave the PNW brewers crap for over reliance on hops. In the time and place I was at, porters and stouts ruled. The hardest thing to brew at home is actually a pale ale or a light lager. You can't hide any mistakes in those because they are 'sex in a canoe' beers.

r0b05 1y ago

Could you point me in the direction of some actual chocolate please

FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
https://valrhona-collection.us/ https://valrhona-collection.us/

ahmeneeroe-v2 1y ago

You should try a high quality cigarette!

FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
I miss my Nat Sherman Fantasia's... although I am grateful I was finally able to quit smoking years ago. Thank god for city-wide bans.