Sour Taste Essay

Taste or gustation is one of the senses that we have. We use it when we eat or drink something and we use our tongues for that sense. There are different tastes that we can perceive by the different sides in our tongues. There is the sweet taste, which we can usually have when we eat candies or chocolates, bitter, when drinking coffee, salty taste, like the taste of the salt, our sweat or tears and then there’s the sour taste, the thing that can get your face looked crumpled like when you eat an unripe mango or the flavor of the vinegar.

The chemistry of sour taste and the strategy or technique on how we could reduce the taste would be briefly discussed here. Of course with the help of the study material by Hong Li and Fang Liu entitled ‘The …show more content…
The results of the conducted experiment showed that there is no sour taste evident in all of the sodium acetate solutions though, they all have anionic acetic acid species. On the other side, the results confirmed that all the acetic acid solutions had an evident sour taste and that its intensity increased along the elevation of the concentration of the acetic acid species. The composition between the sodium acetate and acetic acid is mainly the reason of the difference in the sour taste of the solutions. There is a huge significant difference between the solutions. It is first, the concentration of the hydrogen ions and second, is protonated acid species’ concentration. The total pH for the sodium acetate solution is about 7.1 while the pH values for 50, 100 and 150 mg/l for the acetic acid solutions are 3.77, 3.59 and 3.40 respectively. Between the different acetic acid species, there is an equilibrium and its extent is determined by pKa value where the ratio of the acetic acid or its pKa value is 4.75 at a temperature of 25®C. So when calculated, the anionic acetic acid species is about greater than 99% when the pH is above 6.75 and that the protonated acetic acid species is above 99% when its pH is less than 2.75. As a conclusion, sodium acetate solutions only have the anionic acetic acid species and do not contribute to sour taste. And to confirm whether the protonated acid species contributes to sour taste, different concentrations of the sodium acetate solutions were adjusted to pH 4.0 by the use of hydrochloric acid. The results showed that the higher the concentration of the protonated acetic acid species, the higher the intensity of the sour taste for these sodium acetate solutions. As for the verification whether hydrogen ions are one of the chemical substances that produce the sour taste, again, different concentrated solutions of free