How does taste work?

[Kermit power]

This thread about subscription coffee services just got me thinking about how individual taste works, and why some people like things that others hate.

I've got no reason to doubt that plenty of people do really love coffee, and can tell the difference between all sorts of different types, but personally I absolutely loathe the stuff. I've heard enough people who do like it praising it, and also condemning a bad coffee to try it on a few occasions on people's recommendation, but still it has been uniformly disgusting, and always tastes the same to me.

Similarly, whilst I could have a good stab at identifying the strength and colour of a pint of bitter tasted blind, all lager tastes exactly the same to me, but I assume this isn't the case to lager drinkers, on the basis that they make a choice rather than always asking for the cheapest?

Does anyone know why this is the case? How does the sense of taste/smell work to make some people like things and others loathe them?

[Jimmy Recard]

This is connected to what you're talking about and I find it quite interesting:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2011/nov/...

I hate sprouts, I struggle to eat them without retching or even vomiting. When I was a kid my father used to make sure I had more sprouts than everyone else so I would get over my 'fussiness'. Having read up on it since that simple reason makes sense to me.

[probably chalk]

I'll be particularly interested in the answers to this one. I had a bad cold last week which took away my senses of taste and smell entirely (never happened before). The standard cold symptoms have more or less gone but the senses haven't returned. I was going to give it another week.

[Einion Yrth]

It's an interesting question, to which I have no convincing answer; perhaps others do.

[grumbledoak]

Most of taste is smell. And that works because of chemical reactions with cells connected pretty much directly to your brain:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olfaction

Whether you like or dislike things is an interesting one. Some stuff smells bad to everyone (dead bodies, rotten eggs, the French), but for other things there is a genetic component that differs between people e.g. coriander is disgusting stuff, to me:
http://www.nature.com/news/soapy-taste-of-coriande...