For decent tasting beans don’t soak them at all, clean and boil them normally with some salt or bullion. Never soak your beans if you want them to taste good.
Yes and soaking scientifically doesn't affect it either.
>Gray and his colleagues developed a method for extracting most of the alpha-galactosides from beans. The beans are boiled for three minutes (effectively killing the bean and allowing the sugars to pass through the cell walls), then allowed to stand for two hours. That water is poured off and the beans are covered and soaked for another two hours. Then they’re drained, covered and soaked another two hours before being drained and rinsed a final time.
>This method succeeded in ridding the beans of 90% of the troublesome sugars, but as you might expect, there was a side effect. “I used to do this blanch-soak method all the time at home and it works very nicely,” Gray says. “The one thing people who ate dinner with us have noted is that you do lose some flavor.”
>What’s more -- without going into details of what they measured and how -- suffice it to say that even with almost all of the alpha-galactosides gone, there wasn’t a consistent marked decrease in human flatulence.
>“We reduced the alpha-galactoside content by 90% but we haven’t done anything to dietary fiber,” says Gray, “and dietary fiber produces similar effects.”
As for flavor, I can't recall having more flavor coming from not soaking the beans. In fact I get more umami richness from a long soak.