Beer and music

Taste is a multidimensional and multisensational experience. In this news column before we have reported how you taste id impacted by things like the colour of your plate, the level of noise around you, and even how much you have paid for what you are tasting. Now a new study has shown that your beer tastes different according to the music that is playing while you drink it.

In the study, a Belgian beer company combined with a British band called The Editors. The Belgians developed a beer that they thought roughly corresponded to the sound and feel of an album by The Editors. If you think, “How could a beer reflect a group?”, rest assured that beer making is a real art and there is much discussion of body, citrus notes, chocolate flavours, maltiness and the mix of grains.

So, with the beer perfected, the experiment could begin.

The Belgians developed a beer that they thought roughly corresponded to the sound and feel of an album by The Editors.

The study involved three groups of beer drinkers. The first group drank the beer from a bottle without a label and did not listen to any specific music. The second group drank the beer from a bottle with a label and the third group drank the beer from a labelled bottle while a song from The Editors (Oceans of Light) played in the background.

Those who listened to The Editors and also saw the label on the beer rated it as more pleasant than either of the other groups.

So not only did the music but also the packaging influenced the taste of the beer. Armed with this knowledge surely it can’t be too long before we have band called “The Beertles” on the airwaves.

Source: Frontiers in Psychology