Bitter Drinks Liking

Your result, the one DNA position behind it, and what the research says.

5/10 confidence.

About Bitter Drinks Liking

When a very large food survey was reduced to factors - clusters of things people tend to like together - one of them grouped coffee, beer, red wine and other bitter adult drinks. They share a quality: nobody likes them at first, and liking is acquired. This position came out attached to that cluster. It sits near TSNARE1, a gene involved in moving vesicles inside neurons, which is a long way from taste and is a reason to hold the finding lightly. The survey it comes from did test its own results in separate cohorts, and only a minority of them held up.

Good to know: Coffee, beer and wine cluster together because they are all acquired bitter tastes. The gene here has no obvious connection to taste, which is a reason for caution. This is about liking the group of drinks, not about how much of them anyone drinks.

Fun fact: Bitterness is the taste humans are born most averse to, which is thought to be a defense against poisonous plants - making the popularity of coffee and beer a genuinely odd fact about our species.

Discovery: Food-liking factors were mapped genome-wide in UK Biobank in 2022.

The Variant

The single variant behind this trait

Gene: TSNARE1

Variant (rsID): rs4129585

Location: Chr 8:142,231,572

dbSNP rs4129585

The studies

Large-scale GWAS of food liking reveals genetic determinants and genetic correlations with distinct neurophysiological traits (May-Wilson S et al., Nature communications, 2022)

Other lifestyle traits

Potato Chip Liking: A change in a non-coding stretch of chromosome 5, linked in a very large survey to liking for potato chips.

Savory Food Liking: A change in APOE linked, in a very large food survey, to how much people report liking meat, dairy and rich savory food as a group.

Sugar Intake: A change in FTO linked to how much total sugar people report eating, and to how sweet things are perceived.

Back to All Traits

Content updated September 2026.

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