To improve beer's flavour, just add music

Eating and drinking is a multisensory experience, involving taste, smell and vision. But what about hearing? Can music change the way we taste?

To find out, 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. The taste profile was designed to broadly correspond to The Editors’ album In Dreams.

Then, a team of researchers 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 album.

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.

Those presented with both the label and track reported greater enjoyment than those presented with the beer and label alone.

Lead researcher Dr Felipe Reinoso Cavalho said that people who previously knew the song 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.

“It seems that the added pleasure that the song brought into the experience was transferred into the beer’s flavour,” he said.

Felipe said the team is keen to continue the research by assessing how sounds can modulate perceived flavour attributes of food and beverages, such as bitterness, sweetness, sourness and creaminess.

“We also want to understand how sounds can influence our decision-making process, in order to see if different sounds could, for example, lead people towards healthier food choices,” he said.

“We will also be able to work with other food and beverage types and progressively include other senses in this pairing process, such as vision, smells, touch.”

The results of the study have been published in Frontiers in Psychology.