UNM wrote:
Very much so. I used to use milk, nowadays coffee with milk in tastes awful no matter what the brand or type (soy, oat, almond, rice, cow, goat, human). Not so long ago I found black coffee undrinkable. Thing is we have expectations of what flavour we are about to get and this affects the actual experience. I suspect some of the same applies to texturing milk to - if you expect jonesy's to be better than frankie's or luigi's or Paul's milk, then it quite possibly can affect the texturing. This in turn has a knock on effect to the finished drink. Just a theory.
More than a theory, there are all kinds of empirical studies which show that perception of a product affects what we actually taste. At a simple level, try eating something without either seeing or smelling it. So thinking that Jonesy's milk is superior to supermarket milk, as I do, undoubtedly affects how my brain interprets the signals it gets when the milk molecules hit my taste sensors. Doesn't mean it's not actually better (whatever 'better' means), just something to be conscious of.
