3. A Better Son/Daughter Vibes
I hope you like your bibliographies Chicago-style
Daylight is gradually growing each day and this time, this year, we’re all really going to do it, whatever “it” is for you. We’ll be awake, we’ll be alert, and all that. Somehow the things we’ve never changed, our perceived shortcomings we’ve never overcome, the one bad habit that would change our lives if we could just stop doing it, this year we’ll suddenly be the kind of people who change all that once and for all. Watch this space.
It’s highly unlikely any of that will happen, but we probably will make small changes in our daily routine that are still meaningful to us individually. Hopefully, we will make bigger changes in our way of viewing the world and our power within it - leaving the cave and learning to be uncomfortable with the temporary blindness of stepping into a more open and honest world.
Here are some lessons that have been enunciated for me in the past year that I will carry into the new year and beyond and will continue to examine how they show up in my life and in the world at large.
Ask Culture vs. Guess Culture
If one concept completely rocked my world and made me start paying more attention to how I and others navigate relationships, personal and professional, this is it. This has changed my life and continues to change it as I strive to shift toward an ask culture mindset rather than a guess culture mindset, which is an incredibly uncomfortable endeavor for me. It ranks right up there with how we’re all breathing wrong in my kid-talking-about-dinosaurs conversation topics this year.1
As described by Andrea Donderi in a 2007 online forum post, there are two types of people in the world. In her own words:
In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it's OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.
In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't even have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.
I am decidedly in Team Guess Culture. I get anxious when interacting with Team Ask Culture and am asked a direct question that requires me to say no. I give people choices of what they would like to do when they ask me what I would like to do, even (especially) when I have a clear preference. Recognizing that askers are not being rude and that I, too, can ask direct questions and be okay if the answer is no is like exposure therapy for me. However, it’s also enabled me to receive answers and information more quickly as well as encouraging (sometimes forcing) transparency about the reality of the situation. And I didn’t die when someone said no or I didn’t like the answer I got - I used it as information to move forward. And no one responded with “Boo, you’re the worst, how dare you.” which is also lowkey what I think may happen when I am direct rather than indirect.
Identities Are Not Credentials & The Halo Effect
The presence of a marginalized person is not the same as inclusivity nor does it mean the person shares a similar mindset as you, even if you share the same marginalized identity. This is another huge one for me as I found myself, particularly in the last two years, confused and hurt when people with whom I share identities did not share the values and motivations I thought we did.
White women - I am especially talking about us here. (It’s we, hi, we’re the problem, it’s us.) Being a woman does not a feminist make. Being a woman in a leadership position in a male-dominated industry doesn’t necessarily mean feminism is at work. Sometimes it means the people in positions of power chose the token whose values most align with theirs and won’t make them too uncomfortable by pushing for too much change. Increasing the number of white women in a space is not diversity nor is it inclusive, and in fact usually actively harms both.
This is also where the “I’m a woman and I think it’s funny” comment in the sexist brewery social post media post comes in. ⬅️ Sexism, like racism and everything else in a white supremacy society, is a systemic issue and not one gender vs. everyone else. Identities are not credentials.
The halo effect comes into play here as well. The halo effect is the tendency to like (or dislike) everything about a person.2 You meet a person and like them. You also like it when people are generous and donate time and money. Your brain fills in that because you like this person and you like it when people are generous, this person is probably generous. The truth is, you have no actual evidence the person is generous.
Here is a real-world example of this happening to me this year. I was working on a long-anticipated project with a person for whom I have a great deal of respect and admiration, a person with whom I share at least one identity and who also belongs to at least one other marginalized group (I am not setting you up for a logic problem, I swear). I was so excited to be able to put into practice some sensory theories I had and was eager to learn whether I was correct in my assumptions. These theories involved recruiting people with little to no formal practice in sensory and descriptive vocabulary (i.e. non-male/non-white/non-formally trained people).
As I was talking about the execution, the person interrupted to snap, “This isn’t a DEI initiative.”
I was stunned and confused, for multiple reasons. The biggest one was that I assumed that because we shared marginalized identities and because they identified with other marginalized groups we had the same outlook when it came to opportunities for inclusivity. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how my brain had built a version of this person that doesn’t exist. They never told me what their views or priorities were, but now I had new information about them from which I can move forward.
Social Power Doesn’t Translate to Legal or Political Power
This one is not so much for me but Ashtin Berry (@thecollectress) described it in a way that communicates this concept to people really well. I spent three years of law school learning to pay attention to language, such as “may,” “shall,” “must,” etc. I can spot when someone sends something that sounds threatening but doesn’t say anything at all, such as a recent cease and desist a friend received that talked almost exclusively in terms of “may” and not “must” or “will.” Telling someone they may be liable for slander is not at all the same thing as telling them they are liable for slander. As my paralegal friend aptly put it during a conversation over beers about this concept - “I can leave here and go to the county courthouse to file a lawsuit against you because I didn’t have a good enough time.” And she can. And she can tell me she did. That doesn’t mean the lawsuit will go anywhere or that I will be liable for her not having a good time.
People in positions of social power are more than happy to intimidate you into thinking they can do something actionable that will be harmful to you. Most of the time they can’t. I witnessed the leadership in my former company (I’m sure you can guess which one) routinely brag about their wealth and access to attorneys and threaten to sue anyone, but especially former employees, who dared to speak up about the abuses and systemic issues within the company. Did any former employee ever get sued? No, although many employees who spoke out publicly after leaving the company suddenly found the unemployment payments they received during the pandemic challenged, a challenge that most of them won because guess what? Social power doesn’t translate to legal power.
Recognize when someone is taking advantage of a power dynamic, which a lot of times looks like a confrontation or a challenge, and often involves a sense of urgency that you have to respond right then. You don’t. There’s likely very little they can do to you and these kinds of repeated behaviors have a way of showing themselves to the larger population. You’ll be surprised by how quickly they back down when you set a boundary with them.
I still don’t have a grasp on many of these concepts and may look back on my rudimentary understanding of them with a mix of embarrassment from not quite getting them correct and reflection that I’ve learned more and grown from the person I am when I am writing this. I still maintain my blog I started in 2016 as a fresh-faced beer enthusiast eager to show the world what she learned in part to reflect on how far I’ve come, even when I feel like I know nothing at all.
Year-End Sensory Fun Facts
If I don’t do some sort of end-of-the-year listicle, does this newsletter even exist?
Here are the top sensory facts I learned this year in no particular order that had me excitedly texting people DID YOU KNOW THIS?
Why fall has a distinct smell (If you don’t already, subscribe to the DraughtLab newsletter for interesting articles like this each month)
People with albinism are also anosmic.3
Trans-2-nonenal is the most commonly studied aging flavor in beer chemistry because it makes you feel full and makes you pee less, therefore you won’t drink as much beer if it’s present.4
Trichloroanisole (TCA) is a musty flavor found in wine (i.e. when wine tastes "corked") and beer. We are sensitive to its presence and some people are sensitive to it at 3 parts per trillion. For comparison, the threshold for perceiving diacetyl in beer is commonly between 100 and 200 parts per billion. This level of sensitivity to TCA means that some people can detect one molecule of TCA in the equivalent of two Olympic-sized swimming pools.5
Sensory experts and novices are more alike than different. On average, all of us (experienced or not) can identify about three distinct flavors in a beer.6 The rest, the flowery language, the intensity, all come from memory. The more experience you get, the better you’ll be able to recall what flavors you would expect to taste. There’s no innate talent or genetic superiority. Practice makes progress and sensory is basically a farce we’ve all collectively agreed upon. Don’t let someone tell you that your perceptions are incorrect because it’s all made up anyway.
The concept that “clean” has a smell is a Eurocolonial concept born out of the miasmic medical theory that developed during the plague.7 This was something I had never considered and led me down a rabbit hole to learn more about the way scent is used to "other" people in society. It has also caused me to examine the role I’ve played and play in upholding the concept of olfactory neutrality as an indicator of power within the culture.
Tomatoes lose most of their volatiles, i.e. flavor, through the stem scar at the top of the tomato. When given an option, purchase on-the-vine tomatoes with the stem still attached and they should be more flavorful than those without their stems.8
Remembering this sensory fact had me telling my husband to turn around while I conducted a sloppy (and slightly tipsy) triangle test by giving him two tomatoes with no stems and one tomato liberated from its stem immediately before ingestion. He identified the tomato fresh off the vine as having more flavor.
Science! And also Patience! and Indulgence! for putting up with this and other impromptu sensory exercises that occur in our house, i.e. Why are there strawberries in a sandwich bag on the kitchen counter? Why do you need to see my tongue? Tell me what is in this before I take a drink, etc.
Want people to spend more time and money in your taproom? Play slower-tempo music. Want to free up space and cycle more people through your taproom? Play faster-tempo music. Have a farmhouse ale or mixed fermentation beer you really want customers to appreciate the subtleties and complexity of? Play melodies and beats.9
Being an olfactory LOVER can help with your palate training.10 We all have smells that immediately transport us to a very specific place in our lives. Exploring those smells can help you shift your perceptions from a specific memory that applies only to you to broader descriptive language. Watch the webinar linked below to learn more about the LOVER approach:
L: Limbic system
O: Old
V: Vivid
E: Emotional
R: Rare
During a presentation earlier this year, I shared an example of how applying this technique helped me identify that I was perceiving sulfur compounds when I smelled a beer that reminded me of the perm solution from my childhood. In case you missed it, here’s the picture of me in my permed hair glory - a perm that I BRUSHED daily, a sin almost as cardinal as getting your hair wet right after getting a perm.
And finally
Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I’m up to these days:
Reading Caesar’s Last Breath: And Other True Stories of History, Science, and the Sextillions of Molecules in the Air Around Us by Sam Kean. I’m a sucker for edutainment and fun anecdotes about how science happens. Most of it is by accident or by “hold my beer” moments.
Still listening to Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky. I’ve been eagerly spouting salt facts (women used to hide bags of salt in fake butts!) and air facts from Caesar’s Last Breath (no one would rent lab space to Alfred Nobel so he converted a barge into a floating laboratory and people called it the Nobel death ship!) to anyone within earshot.
Preparing for my very first visit to London ever in a couple of weeks!
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. 1st ed. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.
Reinarz, Jonathan. Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press, 2014. I’ve been trying to verify whether this is true as this book cites its source as a book from the 1920s relating skin color to olfactory aptitude, so…big yikes, we know where this is headed. However, Past Scents is published by the University of Chicago Press and was presumptively fact-checked.
Simpson, Bill. “Practical Beer Taster Training.” Cara Technologies. Virtual class lecture, October 12, 2021.
“AbScent Presents: Smell, Taste, and Flavour 23.03.21.” Interview by AbScent [AbScentAnosmiaSupport], March 25, 2021. Accessed July 27, 2022.
Shepherd, Gordon. Neuroenology: How the Brain Creates the Taste of Wine. Illustrated. Columbia University Press, 2016.
McBride, Nuri. “From Plague Preservative to Perfume: How the Black Death Shaped the Olfactory Landscape of Europe.” Institute of Art and Olfaction. Virtual class lecture, April 18, 2022.
Holmes, Bob. Flavor: The Science of Our Most Neglected Sense. W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.
Beckerman, Joel, and Tyler Gray. The Sonic Boom: How Sound Transforms the Way We Think, Feel, and Buy. Reprint. Mariner Books, 2015.
AbScent [AbScentAnosmiaSupport]. “AbScent Presents: Smell Memory and Smell Loss 06.04.21,” April 7, 2021. Accessed February 20, 2022.