BeerSci: Why You Should Never Drink Beer From A Clear Glass Bottle

Friday, January 18, 2013 - 15:50 in Psychology & Sociology

Beersci Logo Todd DetweilerAvoid gross-smelling drinks by protecting your brew from light. The subject of Beer Gone Bad came up at the office the other day, and I gave my colleagues an impromptu lesson in why "skunking" in beer is very different from a lot of the other ways a beer can turn on you. (And there are many, many ways. We'll cover some of those in a later column.) I wasn't initially going to write about this particular topic because I thought that pretty much everyone who drank beer and was science-minded knew about the correlation between sunlight and a skunky beer. But it turns out that I was wrong -- it wasn't a well-known phenomenon, even among my colleagues -- so I'm going to do my beer-nerdulent duty and replicate the explanation here. Skunked beer smells just how it sounds: You crack open a bottle and an unmistakeably mustelid...

Read the whole article on PopSci

More from PopSci

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net