Can you tell what is in a can from the sound it makes when opened? Let’s find out…
I spent much of the Easter weekend doing the same thing as everyone else – sitting in the garden, attempting to quell a roaring sense of existential dread with alcohol. It was quite nice.
At one point it occurred to me, not for the first time, that the gaseous hiss and metallic plok of a beer can opening is one of life’s best sounds. In my mind, this wonderful and evocative noise must be unique to the beer can. Surely, a can of fizzy pop makes a different, inferior sound when opened? Filled with an urge to explore this idea, and fairly drunk, I spent an hour trying to devise a method of selecting a can at random, opening it, recording my prediction of its contents, and filming the results, on my own, whilst wearing a blindfold.
I failed, naturally. So instead I decided to set the test up with my eyes open, and let BarLifeUK readers do the listening and make the predictions. In this way, I think we can, together, produce one of the most important pieces of drinks journalism since Simon Difford awarded his own Daiquiri bitters 5 stars on Difford’s Guide.
In the first clip you will hear audio of six cans – either Estrella Damm or Diet Coke – being opened. Turn up your sound, grab a pen, and write down your guess for each ‘plok’ as the cans are opened.
In the second clip, you will see video of the cans being opened so that you can check your work.
The Sounds
The Answers
In Conclusion
We won’t be able to truly answer the question ‘Can you tell what is in a can from the sound it makes when opened?’ until the results of this experiment have been collated and sent for peer review, so I think the only conclusion we can draw right now is this:
It’s quite difficult to create content for a bar industry website when you can’t go to any bars. But where there’s a will, and beer, there’s a way…