Cheers! Music can bring your beer alive

There is no doubt that #soothingmusic lifts your mood and makes a perfect evening but popular songs in a #bar can also impact how much you enjoy your #beer.

According to researchers led by Felipe Reinoso Cavalho from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium, music can influence how much you like the taste of beer.

The findings suggest that a range of multi-sensory information such as sound, sensation, shape and colour can influence the way we perceive taste.

“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,” Cavalho said.

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.”

The team then 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.

“We have shown that people that previously knew the song that was used in the experiment, not only liked the multisensory experience of drinking beer more while listening to it, but they also liked the beer itself more,” Cavalho noted.

“It seems that the added pleasure that the song brought into the experience was transferred into the beer's flavour,” he added in a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Speaking about the next step, Cavalho said: "We want to keep assessing how sounds can modulate perceived flavor attributes of food and beverages, such as bitterness, sweetness, sourness and creaminess.”