On the first leg of my beer adventure, I hit Bells Brewery and I’m using it as an excuse to do another beer pairing. I will be pairing a bottle of Oberon with a can of Oberon. People always seem to have opinions about differences between bottles and cans, but no real evidence behind them. With both a bottle and a can of the same beer in my fridge, now is my chance.
In the spirit of 99 Beers for Trev, I only counted this as single beer. I “reviewed” both on the same page but with two different colored pens: black for the bottle, red for the can. These are beer 27 of 99.
I wanted to try to get as many differences as I could, so I poured some of each into tasting glasses and also left some in the container to drink. On pouring I noticed my first difference in the head of the beer. The canned beer had a little more foam and it lasted a little longer. I’ve always thought beer poured nice from a can (I always seem to get the right amount of head from pouring a can), so this might be a me difference, but still a difference.
In the aroma, I could smell the same thing (surprise!) but I did note a little more fruit in the canned beer than the bottle, which I assume is from aroma in the foam. After the beer sat, the aromas were identical. There was a grainy wheaty smell along with some citrus fruit.
The grains carried over into the flavor with apple flavors joining with the orange and citrus. The beer doesn’t have a ton of body, but enough of malt backbone to have a little weight and a reasonably dry finish.
Another difference that I noticed, and debated whether was real or imagined, was in the level of carbonation. I feel like the bottled beer had a little extra tingle of carbonation above the bottle. It was a subtle difference, but enough to note.
