If you’ve noticed, people tend to enjoy their beer better when music is on, and this is why most bars tend to have music for customers to enjoy their booze.
According to a study published in Frontiers in Psychology, music can influence how much you like the taste of beer.
A team of researchers led by Dr. Felipe Reinoso Cavalho, from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and KU Leuven, 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 didn’t 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.
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.
Filipe said: “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.
“It seems that the added pleasure that the song brought into the experience was transferred into the beer’s flavour.” He added.
The findings from the study suggest that a range of multisensory information, such as sound, sensation, shape and colour, can influence the way we perceive taste.
S.O.Z