Music can make beer taste better

Listening to music while drinking can influence how much you like the taste of beer, a new study has found. The findings suggest that a range of multisensory information, such as sound, sensation, shape and colour, can influence the way we perceive taste. The Brussels Beer Project collaborated with UK band The Editors to produce a porter-style beer that took inspiration from the musical and visual identity of the band. The ale had a medium body and used an Earl Grey infusion that produced citrus notes, contrasting with the malty, chocolate flavours from the mix of grains used in production.

This taste profile was designed to broadly correspond to The Editors latest album, ‘In Dreams’.
Researchers led by Felipe Reinoso Cavalho, from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and KU Leuven in Belgium, designed an experiment to see if the influence of music and packaging design would result in a more positive tasting experience. They invited 231 drinkers to experience the beer in three different conditions.

The first served as a control group and drank the beer along with a bottle without a label. In this case, they did not listen to any specific song. The second group, testing the influence of packaging, tasted the beer after seeing the bottle with the label. The third group drank the beer presented with the label while listening to ‘Oceans of Light’, one of the songs on the band’s latest album which the beer was created to reflect.

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Before the test the participants rated how tasty they thought the beer might be. Then after tasting they rated how much they had actually enjoyed the drink.

The results showed that those presented with the label and track reported both greater enjoyment than those presented with the beer and label alone.

“We have been able to see that people tend to feel more pleasure when experiencing beverages along with sounds that are part of the beverage’s identity,” said Reinoso Cavalho.