Does Beer Taste Better From A Bottle Or A Can?: My Latest Piece on The Alcohol Professor

Not exactly wine, but it does take a lot of beer to make a good wine, right?? Wine also utilizes both bottle and can packaging formats, so the results could potentially be relevant for the wine industry as well as the beer industry (though, of course, you’d really need to have a study performed to answer the question since wine and beer aren’t exactly the same).


 

What do you think? Does beer taste better from a bottle or from a can? Research, both controlled and anecdotal, suggests that most people would say that the same beer tastes better when it’s in a bottle versus when it’s in a can.

What accounts for this preference? Is there something about a can that construes a negative image in the mind of the consumer? Is there something about the shape, weight, or design of the packaging that influences their preferences? Does the metal of a can impart certain

Photo courtesy Beverages journal

flavors that glass keeps more pure – perhaps beer actually DOES taste better from a bottle due to chemical and physical interactions within the packaging?

Last year, a study in the journal Beverages (link to the open access study here) aimed to answer this question once and for all. There were three parts to this study: 1) a questionnaire aimed to determine demographics and preferences for drinking beer out of bottles or cans; 2) the main portion of the study: a taste test; and 3) a blind taste test. This study took place in the UK, with the main taste test study taking place just before the Edinburgh Science Festival in Scotland.

Find out more about the study and the results here at this link to the full article on The Alcohol Professor. Bottles or cans?  What’s the verdict?