Well I'm a bit late but here I am for my weekly #beersaturday review! If you're curious about this competition, check out this post for entry details (and to vote on my comment in the post to help me win :P).
I thought I'd do something a little different for this weeks review. Rather than focus on a beer, I'll be comparing the same beer in can and glass bottle to see if there's a difference between the two.
I was talking to another beery type person recently who mentioned that beer in a can was always better than the same beer in a bottle. So I wanted to find out if this is true.
The only beer in my local bottle shop that I could find that was sold in both bottles and cans was:
This is a German Pilsener from the macro brewer Oettinger Bier Gruppe. This is not at all a good beer, so I won't go into a lot of detail about the beer itself, as it really wasn't enjoyable to drink.
And the rating on ratebeer.com really speaks volumes for this beer, and I completely agree with this rating. It's bitter, watery, and mildly hoppy. This can be a great combination of things of course, but in this beer everything just tastes cheap and stale.
So rather than waste time talking about how bad this beer is lets look at the difference between the beer in the bottle and the beer in the can.
I tried the bottle first, and was really not impressed at all. The bottle had a strong bitter hops aroma, and formed a small head at the pour that dissipated very quickly.
The beer was watery, had a strange staleness to it, and the bitterness lingered on the palate long after the first sip. It's just a bad beer, and I really didn't see how a can could improve this.
Oddly, the can poured much better. The head that formed was finer, and lingered for a long time after the pour. The aroma wasn't so strong or bitter, and weirdly the beer had a creamier texture that wasn't unpleasant. There was an odd metallic taste to this beer though which didn't sit at all well with me.
This is still a very average beer but the beer in a can was much more drinkable and didn't leave that shocking aftertaste for quite so long.
Surprisingly, my #beersaturday friend whose username I cannot remember seems to be on to something. The canned beer was a clear winner in this example, even if the beer was shockingly bad. And judging by this article (and the various others on this topic) cans appear to be better than bottles for a variety of reasons.
So I suppose this means that you'll see me drinking from cans quite a lot in the future.
