Are you a fast beer drinker? Studies have shown that the type of glass you drink from affects how fast you drink. Read more below
WOULD you like that in a straight or a jug, sir?” was once a common response to British pubgoers’ request for a pint. Like the Lilliputians in “Gulliver’s Travels”, who argued whether a boiled egg should be opened at the pointed or the rounded end, beer drinkers were adamant that only from their preferred shape of glass did their tipple taste best.
Straight-sided glasses—sometimes with a bulge a little below the lip—have largely won the day. Jugs—squat cylinders of dimpled glass equipped with handles—are now rare. But that is probably because straight glasses are easier for bar staff to collect and stack, rather than because straight-glass lovers have persuaded their fellow-drinkers of the virtue of their view. The shape of a beer glass does, nevertheless, matter. For a group of researchers at the University of Bristol have shown that it can regulate how quickly someone drinks.
Angela Attwood and her colleagues asked 160 undergraduates—80 women and 80 men—to do one of four things: drink beer out of a straight glass; drink beer out of a flute (a glass whose sides curve outward towards the rim); or drink lemonade from one of these two sorts of glass. To complicate matters further, some of the glasses were full whereas others were half-full. Though, as is common practice in studies of this sort, participants were misled about its true nature, and were shown films and asked to do a language test afterwards, to support this misdirection, what Dr Attwood and her team were really interested in was how quickly the various drinks would be drunk.
