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And in today's video we answer a viewer question because Scotty asks us,
"Why is beer always sold in glass bottles, or cans, and never plastic bottles, like pop is?"
Alright Scott, and everyone else, here we go:
Plastic as a material has pretty much changed the way we live our lives.
It's cheap, it can be molded into practically any shape,
and is for the most part easily recyclable (when people bother to do so).
So why is it that we still use glass bottles and cans to store our beer?
Is it to do with aesthetics or taste? Or maybe there is another factor at play...
Now many would be surprised to learn this,
but it turns out that beer is sometimes stored in plastic bottles in some parts of the world.
In the U.K. plastic beer bottles are a fairly common sight at festivals and the like.
In fact at many festivals in the U.K., it is actually mandatory to serve alcohol in plastic bottles.
For example during the 2012 Olympic Games,
Heineken, the official alcohol sponsor of the games stocked refrigerators across London with over a million plastic bottles of beer made especially for the event.
While they claimed it was for environmental reasons, it has been speculated that it was actually done due to safety concerns.
For any event where you're going to have thousands of drunk people from various cultures watching a competition they are emotionally invested in,
and within extremely close proximity to one another,
it just makes sense to not give them tiny glass clubs
and the potential means of stabbing each other.
"So why isn't this practice more widespread?" you ask.
Well perhaps the answer that is most pertinent to us as customers
is that putting beer into plastic bottles can affect how it tastes.
Plastic is a great deal more porous than glass,
which itself is almost impermeable to oxygen and carbon dioxide.
In lay terms this means your beer or your soft drink will go flat sooner in a plastic bottle than it would in a glass one
because the carbon dioxide that makes it fizzy in the first place can more easily escape.
The other benefit of glass is that it is almost completely taste-neutral,
which basically means that it doesn't chemically interact with whatever you store inside of it.
To quote the totally unbiased "Glass Is Life,"
"When you eat or drink something from glass,
you're experiencing the pure taste of that food or drink -- nothing more, nothing less."
Plastic on the other hand is chock full of chemicals that could potentially leach into your drink
and ruin your beer and possibly more.
For example, the plastic used to store soft drinks and indeed some beer:
Polyethylene Terephthalate, often shortened to P.E.T.,
leaches a toxic metalloid known as antimony, among other things, into your drink.
When stored at room temperature or less, the amount of antimony that leaches is generally deemed safe,
but as temperatures increase so does the antimony levels in your drink.
When stored in an uninsulated garage for a few months in the summer or other warm areas,
the levels can exceed the recommended limits set by the (U.S.) Environmental Protection Agency.
So in regards to aluminum cans:
Like glass, aluminum is relately impermeable, making it an ideal storage container for beer.
Interestingly, the inside of an aluminum can is coated with a special polymer
specifically to reduce the risk of aluminum leaching into the beverage, which makes things far safer.
Among other things, elevated aluminum levels in the body have been linked to diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinsons.
And by the way, random Bonus Fact here, the man who Parkinsons disease is named after
was actually implicated in a plot to assassinate King George III.
In any event, aluminum cans also have the advantage of being entirely opaque,
which protects the beverage it contains far better than other kinds of packaging.
In fact, another reason glass or more specifically colored glass is often used to house beer
is because it helps protect the beer from the sun's rays.
While it is possible to create plastic that is the same color,
this has the potential to wreak havoc with the established plastic recycling initiatives that are already in place.
The amber color of plastic beer bottles, combined with the additional layers needed to protect the beer inside,
make them more difficult to recycle than the clear plastic bottles favored by the soft drink industry.
A further issue with plastic bottles
is that they simply can't stand up to the pasteurization process that most beers undergo.
You see, after beer has been brewed and packaged,
it will usually be passed through a machine that sprays it with boiling water
to heat the liquid inside to kill off any microbes that could have survived the brewing process.
This both ensures the beer is safe to drink and it vastly improves its shelf life.
While glass bottles and cans are more than capable of weathering this process without incident,
plastic bottles tend to warp.
This means you have to skip the process entirely,
or use a much more hard-wearing plastic which increases its base cost,
something that companies are keen to avoid if possible.
So in the end, while there are indeed beer manufacturers out there
who are looking for ways to make widespread use of plastic beer bottles a reality,
and convince the wider public to accept the switch,
at this particular point in time,
glass and aluminum cans are still king, in this arena.
But perhaps you want to buck that trend and become a brew master yourself,
making your own beer and bottling it however you darn well please.
Well then I need to tell your about SkillShare.
SkillShare have a vast array of courses. They even have ones related to beer,
such as a course all about flavor emulation in beer,
all the way through to how to design a beer label, that you could perhaps stick on that plastic bottle.
That's just an example. SkillShare has courses of pretty much everything,
all the way from beer flavor emulation, to shooting a documentary.
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which.. it can get really pricey after a while, if you like learning a lot of stuff.
But a premium membership with SkillShare allows you to dive in to any course you want
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There's no buying individual courses just to watch one part of it, and no limits on what you can watch and learn.
Really the best way to see the depth of skill on SkillShare is to just try it,
and that is easier than ever with the two month free trial you can get by clicking the link in the description below.
That's two months of a free trial for the first 500 people,
and it also helps support this show, so that's a good thing as well.
Anyway, thanks to SkillShare for sponsoring,
and thanks to you, for watching.