Are you getting blotto on lager more often than you should? If the University of Bristol’s School of Experimental Psychology is to be believed, then you can (try to) blame your glass. According to Dr. Angela Atwood, drinking out of a curved glass makes you drink lager faster.
Atwood came to this conclusion after testing 160 social drinkers with straight and curved glasses. When drinking lager from a curved “flute” glass, the participants apparently drank the beer twice as fast as from a straight one.
Atwood and her colleagues theorize that this is due to drinkers being unable to tell when the glass is half empty when using a curved glass. Because of this, people drink faster, became more inebriated, have more difficulty judging how full the next glass is, and the cycle continues.
So far, experiments have been restricted to lager and soft drinks, with no difference in drinking rates between the alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. Whether the straight versus curved effect also applies to shandy, bitter, India pale ale, stout or scrumpy remains to be seen, but we'd guess the researchers will have no trouble finding participants for further research.
The team's findings are published in the journal PLoS ONE
Source: University of Bristol