Science Experiment:Tangling your Tastebuds

In this experiment we made drinks from soda water, different flavours, and different food colourings.  We made drinks with different flavours, but used colours that we thought didn't look anything like the flavour.  The point of the experiment is to show how colouring affects how we taste.

The flavours and colours we used were:

• pink almond
• green worcestershire sauce
• blue peppermint
• purple vanilla

You can see the result here:

Next, we labelled each of the drinks with a number, and hid their actual flavours.  Then I asked each member of family to try the drinks and tell me what flavour they were.  My brother Tyler, doesn't no flavours, so we let him pick from the bottles of flavours (but we didn't put out the bottle of Worcestershire sauce, because he wouldn't have tried any of the flavours if he knew one of them would be that!)  Here's a picture of what my family saw:

We also added sweetner to the drinks to make them taste better, because the flavours we added smelled nice, but didn't taste nice.  I even got to have a go at the experiment, because my dad mixed up the glasses so I couldn't remember the flavours.

Everybody in my family guessed peppermint, because the smell was so strong -- it didn't matter what colour it was (Tyler said it was chewing gum -- which is close enough, since we have lots of mint gum!).  My mom and I got mixed up with the purple vanilla, and nobody guessed the worcestershire sauce.  But the worcestershire suace drink tasted really really awful.  In fact, it was so awful, words can't describe it -- only this picture of Tyler trying the green worcestshiresuace drink comes close:

It was fun tasting weird stuff, and trying to trick my family!