It’s a common idea that there’s a right way and a wrong way to pour a pint of beer. Imagine your typical can of beer. Right: Relatively slowly, angled pour resulting in beer with nice and small head. Wrong: Upending the can and sloshing everything in the glass - resulting in massive foaming that takes ages to settle.
My question is - Will the ignorantly dispensed beer eventually settle to precisely the same composition as the correctly poured one?
Anecdotally, I know of some bitters sold in the UK in cans that have CO2 widgets in the bottom (their tradename is literally ‘widget’), activated on opening. You can just dump these straight in a glass and they will settle out no problem, just as if you poured it with care. Also anecdotally, I’ve been served lager at festivals that’s been 2 cans dumped into a large cup, and been a foamy mess that’s never really settled properly. What’s the SD?
ETA: I have no empirical answer to this question as whenever I mispour some ale I’l always take a wee sup to get it to calm down
The second one - is a pint of beer under thermodynamic control, in that it doesn’t matter how you pour it, you still end up with the same pint (eventually). Or kinetic control, in that how you pour it makes a difference to how it ends up.
Part of the settling has to do with convection currents in the glass. I could see how plastic might change that by having a different level of friction with the liquid. Plastic cups are also a different shape than glass ones.
As to the OP… I suppose that eventually everything would settle out the same, but at that point, you’d have ruined BOTH of them. The ideal pouring technique is designed to:
release some of the carbonation
build up a reasonable head for the texture/flavor contrast with the liquid
So the perfect drink of beer is a little head with the liquid beer and an amount of carbonation that’s still nice and sparkly but not fizzing up even more in your mouth. If you pour with no foam at all, you have to wait for the carbonation to come out over time and you’re still missing the head. If you just dump the beer in, you’ve lost a little too much carbonation and have to wait for the head to settle to the right level.
If you have to err one way or the other, better to have too much foam. It won’t be exactly the same, though.
Guinness actually prefers their cans because of the way they’ve engineered it. They’ve had to settle for bottles in the US because of our association between cans and cheap pilsners, but cans aren’t automatically bad. One of my favorite beers is an imported London porter that comes in a can and is superior to anything in a bottle.
This is all that will happen. The more agitation you give the liquid the more CO2 will come out of suspension. If you’re thinking about how if you shake up a carbonated beverage, wait awhile, and open it and it’ll be fine, that doesn’t work when it’s not under pressure. When it’s still in the container the CO2 is pressurizing the vessel and will eventually absorb back into suspension. When it’s in the glass though, the CO2 will roam free giving you flat British beer.
At least you’re not drinking it right out of the can/bottle. That’s something the unwashed philistines do!
Actually, quite a few American microbrews (and really good ones) have been moving to cans.
Mainly, here’s what I understand is the reason why:
Light kills beer. Bottles let in light. Light bad.
Modern cans have an inert, water-based liner. Numerous taste tests show this liner (as with the new fancy, expensive aluminum watter bottles) does not impart any noticeable flavor to the beer. Most importantly, no evil light gets in to hurt the beer.
What needs to be done away with is the ignorant snobbery that bottles are better. Not so.
Anyway, here are three microbrewers I enjoy very much, all using cans:
Yes, for long, i.e. 1 hour, definitions of eventually.
Asothers have said, the path over time from when it comes out of the can/bottle to an hour later will vary depending on how you pour.
And “correctly” is a matter of taste. Some people like a big head & little carbonation. Others prefer no head & lots of fizz. How you pour controls which you get. Certainly the “experts” have defined what they think is ideal, and oddly enough, it’s at some vague point near the middle between the extremes.
Good point - I’m actually in the research grant writing business so there may be some scope here. A colleague of mine has made some seminal contributions in the area of guiness chemistry - Do bubbles in guiness go up or go down?
Widget cans are cool, but you can’t “dump them in a glass”; for proper results they have to be poured down the side. The point of the widget isn’t to produce a small head, but a fine-bubbled, “creamy” head; if you pour the can quickly the fine bubbles merge and you get a mess of mixed froth. (The other easy mistake to make is not keeping the can very cold before opening and pouring. If the can warms even a little the widget gasses off explosively, and the mess can be huge.)
It’s not just bitters by the way; Guiness invented the widget to try to replicate the creamy head of pub-poured Guiness stout. In addition to Guiness stout several English ales (Boddington’s, Tetley’s, Old Speckled Hen) can be found in these cans. Young’s Double Chocolate Stout in widget cans is very smooth but seems to lack the full chocolate taste of the bottled variety; YMMV.
Aluminum cans have been lined since their inception; they’ve never imparted a metallic taste to beer, unless the lining is broken. Drinking out of a can involves putting your mouth on bare metal, which does influence your perception of the beer, but pouring it into a glass eliminates that. Drinking out of a bottle eliminates the entire question, which is why, if you’re going to drink out of a container, glass is better – unless it’s a Guinness bottle with a Widget II.
Guinness’s widget, in case it’s not clear to everyone, is meant to provide a proper head when pouring into a glass. Budweiser also has a recommendation for how to pour their beer for the best combination of carbonation and head – gently, straight down the middle of the glass. They say the aeration is necessary to develop the flavor, and pouring down the side won’t do this. If this is true, I expect that it’s got somewhat to do with oxidation, and somewhat to do with the taste imparted by the gases.
Which gets back to the original question: will splashing the beer vs. tenderly pouring down the side ultimately produce the same result? Maybe – eventually, air will diffuse into the beer and carbon dioxide will diffuse out, eventually all the oxidizable compounds will oxidize, and eventually the head will settle, and a steady state will be reached. At this point, no one will drink it who would have noticed the difference in the first place.
When we say ‘eventually’ here, are we talking about timescales way beyond the normal interval between pouring and drinking a pint?
A carefully-poured pint and a sloshed one must eventually reach the same composition - even if that happens when the liquid components have all evaporated away, leaving only the residues.
But if the question is whether a sloshed pint and a carefully poured pint will be identical in time for them to still be drinkable, I think the answer can certainly be in the negative.
