Beer can make wings taste hotter

I was logging footage last night when I came across a startling fact: beer-drinking can actually make wings taste hotter.

This is according to Mark Weiler (www.wyswings.com), whom hunt fans will remember as the wing fanatic that drove from Virginia to cook for us at his brother's house in Rochester.

"Alcohol - if you drink it before you eat - dilates the tissue in your mouth," Mark told one of our cameramen. "You can go to a place and have extra-hot wings one night and go the next night and have a beer or two first - a half a glass even - and the same wings will seem so much hotter."

Mark didn't elaborate. I would guesst that with further alcohol consumption there comes a point when the dulling of the brain's senses outweighs sensory gain experienced in the mouth, and the wings start tasting milder.

I don't know if my wing senses had been heightened or dulled when I tried the hottest sauce of my life, the Defcon zero (www.defconsauces.com), in Brooklyn on August 18. I had certainly had a few drinks. An extract-based sauce with a gazillion Scoville units and not sold to the general public, the Zero is too dangerous (or mabye just too painful) for the human stomach and unfit to be tried on a wing. Defcon's owners took a drop of the Zero from a nail-polish-sized vial and placed it on a straw. I put the straw in my mouth and sucked.

The agony - like a soldering iron to the lips - peaked at minute five and eased after about twelve minutes.

One way to mitigate hot sauce burn, I learned that night, is to suck on sugar. Another option is eating ice cream. And not for the temperature drop, Mark says. Dairy products have an enzyme that combats the burn of Capsaicin (the molecule that makes peppers hot).

"The dairy enzyme casene cools heat - so anything with dairy in it will help," Mark says. "A lot of people try bread, water, soda, but they don't do much."