On a hot day, no one ever wants to go inside and grab a room-temperature beer, and hopefully the cursed phrase, “Time to crack into a lukewarm one,” hasn’t ever been spoken out loud.
Everyone knows that beer is best served cold. Heck, we still remember when the mountains on Coors Light’s color-changing labels turned a deep blue to let beer drinkers (and bartenders) know when each can had been cooled to its optimum temperature.
But why does beer taste better when it’s cold?
A group of scientists in China recently published a study that attempted to answer that question. “Two years ago, first author Xiaotao Yang and I were drinking beer together,” lead study author Lei Jiang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Phys.org. “He had just finished his doctorate degree thesis and asked me, ‘What should we do next?’ At the time, I was a scientific committee member of one of the biggest Chinese alcoholic beverage companies, and I had the idea to ask the question ‘Why does Chinese baijiu have a very particular concentration of alcohol?’”
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In their study, which was published in the journal Matter on May 1, Jiang, Yang, and their colleagues examined the structure of ethanol alcohol molecules in baijiu, a popular Chinese liquor, at different temperatures. (This gets a bit complicated, but bear with us here.) When alcoholic drinks have higher concentrations of ethanol, those molecules look like they’re end-to-end in “chain-like clusters” and, in drinks with lower ethanol concentrations, the molecules look more like tetrahedral, or pyramid-shaped, clusters. The researchers also determined that the “chain-like” version tasted more like ethanol.
When it came to baijiu, the ethanol clusters were pyramid-shaped when it was served at room temperature, which is how the Baijiu enthusiasts at DrinkBaijiu.com recommend serving it. If the baijiu was heated, though, the molecules rearranged themselves into that more chain-like formation, which gave the drink a more prominent ethanol flavor.
Still with us? Good. Because beer is essentially the opposite: The ethanol clusters in beer are more chain-like at colder temperatures, and then create tiny little pyramids when they warm up. So beer loses its ethanol flavor as its temperature increases.
“At low temperatures, the tetrahedral (pyramid-shaped) clusters become the low concentration amount, and this is why we drink cold beer,” Jiang explained.
According to Phys.org, the researchers are optimistic about the potential applications of their findings. They believe that alcoholic beverage companies could leverage these insights to create beverages that offer an optimum ‘ethanol-like’ taste, while maintaining a lower concentration of actual ethanol. This could potentially revolutionize the beverage industry, offering a new range of drinks that cater to diverse preferences.
We’ll raise a glass to that. A cold glass.
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