Do fizzy drinks really taste different from cans or plastic/glass bottles? My friend prefers cans, but I can’t taste any difference.
lozzinna69
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I like a can best for most things, although Irn-Bru is best from a glass bottle. Beer of the same brand also tastes different from a can, bottle or draft.
Tamereth
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They all taste different. I always prefer cans over plastic bottles. Glass bottles are best.
bernese02
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Drinks are so much better from a bottle. There is a metallic effect from a can.
In my opinion, cans have to be super cold to taste good, but you can get away with room temperature with a bottle.
Charles Spence
University of Oxford, UK
There are certainly psychological effects linked to the weight differences of the bottles and cans that drinks are served in, as well as cultural knowledge about different kinds of drink normally coming in each format. Simply adding a small weight to the bottom of a can of fizzy drink makes it seem to taste better.
As far as cultural factors are concerned, in the UK, people expect mass-produced beer to be sold in a tin. In the US, that preconception is changing with the craft beer revolution, meaning that US consumers are now starting to accept that quality beer can also come in a can.
What we expect, based on packaging, can bias the subsequent tasting experience.
In 2016, I and my colleagues published a study on this effect with Andrew Barnett of Scottish brewer Barney’s Beer. It was conducted at the Edinburgh Science Festival.
For this research, participants were served the same batch of beer in a plastic cup that they had seen being poured from either a can or a bottle. People rated the beer that they knew had come from a bottle as tasting significantly better, even though it was exactly the same as the beer that had been poured from a can. No such preference was reported in a blind tasting, in which the participants didn’t know if the beer had come from a bottle or can.
Of course, one shouldn’t forget the possible impact of differences in the sound of opening a drink either. This can influence both our sensory expectations about what it will taste like and our hedonic expectations about how much we think that we are going to enjoy the experience. There is a bit of Pavlov’s dogs in all of us.
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