The science of tapping beer cans
I’m linking to a Danish page here, sorry to those of you who do not quite master that language yet.
It concerns the age old question of whether you prevent a shaken beer can from spilling when you open it, if you tap the can on the top first. A lot of people do this, but does it have any effect?
Klaus Seiersen — incidently an old drinking buddy of mine from the physics department — did an experiment with 30 cans and didn’t see any correlation with tapping and amount spilled.
You spill your beer when it foams out of the can, and the foam is caused by the CO2 in the beer. When you shake the can, the CO2 gets mixed with the beer, and the beer foams. To prevent this, all you have to do is to wait until the CO2 settles in the top of the can again…
July 30th, 2008 at 8:09 am
Are you applying for grant money to pursue this research?
July 30th, 2008 at 8:20 am
Not yet, but it is not a bad idea :)
August 7th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Ah .. but i feel that this research is not as groundbreaking as the one published in BMJ
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/331/7531/1498
The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute
Megan S C Lim, research assistant1, Margaret E Hellard, director1, Campbell K Aitken, senior research officer1
1 Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health Research, Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Medical Research and Public Health, GPO box 2284, Melbourne, Victoria, 3001, Australia
Correspondence to: C K Aitken aitken@burnet.edu.au
Abstract
Objectives To determine the overall rate of loss of workplace teaspoons and whether attrition and displacement are correlated with the relative value of the teaspoons or type of tearoom.