This is a question that may have a factual answer. It is not the forum to post what kind of beer someone drinks sucks. WTF do you care what someone else drinks, anyway?
In THIS thread I posted:
To which Katie Mae replied:
To which I replied:
Which brings us to the point of this thread.
In my observation, some (not all) beers taste decisively different when packaged in an aluminum can as opposed to when they are packaged in a glass bottle.
**Last nights experiment: **
I drank 2 beers. Same brand. Nothing else. 1 can of Blatz, 1 glass bottle of Blatz.
the canned beer had a strong taste of metal, even when the beer was poured out into a clean drinking glass and then consumed. The glass bottled beer did not have any foreign flavors detectable by my palate.
Today’s experiment:
I consumed 2 beers. 1 aluminum can of Old Milwaukee, 1 glass bottle of Old Milwaukee. The canned beer had a strong metallic flavor even when poured out into a clean drinking glass. The glass bottled beer had no detectable foreign flavors.
Observation: many other beers (PBR, Miller, Bud, etc) taste identical whether from a can or a glass bottle.
Question: is it the beer, or is it the can? Is there something in cheap-ass swill beer that reacts badly to aluminum cans, or does the brewer use different, sub-standard cans with different coatings on the inside that affects the beer?
Well, first off, you need to do a blind study. You need to have someone else pour a bunch of cans and bottles of all these beers, in a different room and bring them in and have you identify which are bottles and which are cans. Don’t worry about figuring out the brands. Just bottle or can and you need to do much better then 50%, otherwise it’s just you seeing them come out of the can.
I’d like to see them have, say, 4 or 5 beers, each in a bottle and can, pour a shot of each, label the shot glasses with numbers and have the code in the other room. Bring all the glasses to you at once and have you identify the four cans.
The next night, same idea, but, but an extra two shot glasses with two canned beers or two bottled beers (different brands) just to make a little harder.
Obviously, this is a lot of extra work and I’m not saying you’re imagining this, but it would certainly rule out it being in your head.
I wonder if they just make the beers on different lines and something on the can line is imparting the off taste? Or maybe the beers with the off taste just use crappy cans. I’ve certainly heard the complaint before, I’m sure most other people have as well.
I’m with Joey P. Aluminum is a pretty damn reactive metal, but it doesn’t take long after exposure to air for it to form a protective layer of aluminum oxide. Acidic foods can react with it but I don’t know for sure if that’s after the aluminum foil/container had that oxide layer scratched or broken, allowing the acidic food to come into contact with bare aluminum.
I’m with everyone above. You must do at least a blind trial, prefrably double blind (where you need two assistants, one who fills the glasses, the second, who doesn’t see which are which, then brings them to you to try.) Finally you could turn it into an ABX test - where you know which A and B is, but are not told what X is - and have to see if you can actually pick the right one - which proves that there is a discernible difference at all.
One complication - don’t try this with beer from clear glass bottles. Most brewers won’t sell beer in clear glass, but a few will. Beer is noticeably affected by light, and will easily taste different (worse) if affected.
Of the double blind studies I have read, there is no significant difference in taste between beer from a can and that from a bottle. I do not doubt that you could tell a difference, but you know which is which.
The aluminum can is coated with a lacquer so the beer never touches the metal. Not only that, aluminum oxidizes so quickly that the surface the beer touches as it flows over the pop-top is really aluminum oxide, not aluminum, and the aluminum oxide adheres very tightly to the can that none of it ends up in the beer.
As far as your choice of beer goes, well, if you like it, that is all that matters. I had always thought of Blatz as a premium beer while Old Milwaukee being a price beer, but they are both Light American Lagers, and are not as flavorful as other styles.
There is a small brewery that just started up not far from where I live. The owner was a member of the same Homebrew club as I am. When he bought his equipment, he bought a canning line instead of a bottling line because he could get the canning line for about 1/3 the cost of the bottling line (I forget if the cost of the bottles figured into his costs, but it was a big enough difference that he decided that it was worth it). Now, craft brews are sold to people with discriminating tastes and if the can affected the taste, I don’t think he would have tried to save the money. This was over four years ago, and he is still in business, in fact, has expanded his offerings and now offers 750 ml bottles in addition to the cans. Southern Star Brewing.
Now, I prefer beer from bottles, but I don’t mind cans. If I have to have cans, I try to get a glass, but if I’m thirsty, I am not so particular.
Consider that there might be a difference between beer drunk directly from a can and beer poured from a can into a glass. I speculate that the smell of aluminum et al from the top of the can affects the sensory experience.
hijack!
1999 Blind taste test of lagers by James Fallows. Alas, cans were not tested.
hijack!
They sold their brand to Pabst in 1959. Miller Brewing makes the stuff now.
Another issue here is that not all cans are made equal. I know that Guinness put a lot of work into designing their cans and were a little miffed when the American bias against cans meant they had to go with bottles.
I have no experience with Blatz, but if they assume their can-drinking audience want cheap over flavor, then it could well be that their bottled product tastes better.
I don’t like to drink beer from cans for that reason. The metal texture and smell I don’t care for. But pouring that same beer into a glass tastes just fine.
I would actually say beer from cans, when poured into a glass, tastes better than bottled beer, particularly because there is no chance for light to interact with the beer and cause any off flavors from becoming “light struck” (aka, skunkiness.) For example, I will only buy Pilsner Urquell in cans if I buy it at all. I’ve just been burned too many times by the bottled version of that beer. The can version still doesn’t taste anything like what I got out in Central Europe, but it’s somewhat better than the bottle version.
It’s interesting to see how over the last two years or so craft brewers have moved HARD to canned beers. Canned microbrews are all over the place here now, and I barely remember seeing them just a couple years ago. Cans don’t have the stigma they once had in the craft world.
I’ve been wrinkling my nose the last couple days because of this canned Budweiser I bought. The beer tastes fine, but I’m getting a nose-full of some smell from tops of the cans. I didn’t have this problem with the canned MGD I’d been drinking previously.
I’ve heard this bottle/can meme as far back as I can remember, but I can’t say I’ve ever been able to tell any difference myself. But then, I like airline food too.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a beer out of a can where I detected a strong metallic taste. I’ve tasted it out of bottles though, when they’ve sat in the cooler/fridge too long and have developed a bit of oxidation around the bottle cap. Always use a cocktail napkin or something to clean the lip of your bottle folks. Sometimes you’ll be surprised by what you find.
Now don’t get me started on canned/bottled beer vs. beers on tap. Oh, the horror.
pulykamell is right about cans actually being better for beer than bottles because of less light (and oxygen) exposure. Can technology is much better than it was years ago and off-flavors from the aluminum have been pretty much eliminated.
See here for a recent article on the trend. Sam Adams is looking at how to make it taste better even directly from the can.
MMMMMMM, if you see the owner, tell him he does a good job. I love their Le Mort Vivant.
But, I do think drinking it (or any beer) from the can is a different flavor from drinking it in a glass or a bottle. This makes sense, because I can taste a piece of aluminum I put in my mouth, and I am doing just that when I’m drinking from a can. Also, the carbonation level of the beer changes more as you drink it from the can, the different opening makes it go more flat toward the end of the beer.
Now, that isn’t always bad. Like the Southern Star beers, I felt that pre-Gambrinus Shiner from the can and bottle tasted very different, but I liked it both ways and I preferred it in a bottle or a glass. Post-Gambrinus Shiner still tastes different in the can and the bottle, and with how it tastes today, I prefer to drink it straight from the can. That’s right, some beers taste better to me with a twinge of aluminum in them.
On the other hand, I also like airline food (mmmm, powdered eggs), and I had a craving for the flavor of Mickey’s malt liquor on the way home from work that I’m currently satisfying. So, take my tastes with an extra shake of salt.
Here’s an interesting blind taste test. For the most part, only half the people correctly identified the canned beer. Interestingly (and supported what some said above), there was a difference among beer brands. Only 17% preferred the canned Budweiser over bottled, but 68% preferred both canned Heineken and canned Sierra Nevada over the bottled versions.
Local beer brewer Rivertowne Pour House has some OK beer. I recently had their Hala Kahiki Pineapple Beer when it was on tap at my local beeratorium. It was awesome. After the keg kicked (in no small part due to my efforts), I bugged the owner to order it in cans. It was awful. Tasted like a totally different recipe, even the degree of carbonation was different.
