Coffee lovers know that drinking a caffeinated beverage first thing in the morning can fill their cup in more ways than one.
In curating your overall coffee experience, the mug from which you drink it is just as important as the way you brew it, according to coffee experts and journalists Jordan Michelman and Zachary Carlsen, who write about that in their book “But First, Coffee,” which came out last year.
Michelman and Carlsen explained that while the mug one drinks out of doesn’t have a major impact on taste, there is still a subtle change in perception. A collection of personalized coffee mugs isn’t unlike a sommelier who keeps an assortment of glasses for different wines, Well + Good reported.
The ritual of drinking coffee, which includes what mug one drinks out of, can experientially influence a person’s perception — thereby altering taste.
“Our brains are the most marvelous things, fleshy supercomputers of remarkable complexity and precision, able to connect involuted concepts like ‘flavor’ and ‘deliciousness’ into something cohesive and memorable. But the flavor receptors in our tongue are also fallible and easily influenced by forces beyond proof of taste,” Michelman and Carlsen explained.
They said that things like music and even the company you’re with can make wine taste better — and coffee is no different.
“Mellifluous music, a sweet evening breeze, charming company—all these forces can and do make things like food and wine taste better. So it goes with coffee—our brains are influenced by everything around us at the moment of consumption. This means that when it comes time to pick a mug, the vessel you drink from matters a great deal,” they waxed poetic.
Using a certain coffee mug can induce feelings of nostalgia, thereby making someone more happy as they have their first beverage of the day.
“We’ve thought about this a great deal because we’re mug lovers in a deep and abiding way, collectors of many a mug from our years of travel and study across the world of coffee,” Michelman and Carlsen told Well + Good.
“A vintage mug emblazoned with your favorite cartoon character from childhood or a particularly memorable campaign from a beloved sports team can make for very happy drinking,” they added.
Furthermore, associating coffee with a specific memory can “help the coffee taste better, creating a ‘flavoristic’ experience with multiple dimensions and resonances.”
It doesn’t hurt that some mugs have positive affirmations written on them, which can kickstart someone’s day with a jolt of confidence.
“Research has shown that just looking at positive affirmations can improve mental alertness, clarity and mood — and that’s before your first sip,” they said, referencing a 2106 study published in the National Library of Medicine.
The Post has reached out to Michelman and Carlsen for further comment.
There’s also scientific research to support the claim that the type of mug you use can affect its flavor.
A 2014 study published in Flavour found that coffee tastes more intense when it’s served in a white mug.
“It is possible that color contrast between the mug and the coffee may have affected the perceived intensity/sweetness of the coffee,” the study’s authors explained.
The authors said that the study highlighted the “influence of product-extrinsic color on the multisensory perception of food and drink,” which points to how multiple factors influence taste.
An article from Food & Wine also claimed that coffee tastes better in a green mug.
They said that the color green is associated with sour flavors, and drinking from a green mug can make the coffee seem more complex and sour, which are favorable tastes for coffee.
“Taste is multisensory; what you touch, see, smell and hear can all impact the flavor you perceive,” they explained.
“Studies on the associations between color and taste reveal that people tend to link certain colors with certain flavors.”
In 2018, coffee researcher Fabiana Carvalho found that coffee in a pink mug makes it taste sweeter, Sprudge reported.
The rounder the cup, the sweeter the taste as well, she also found.
Ultimately, though, taste may be just a matter of, well, taste.