Loud Music Makes Sweet, Sweet Alcohol even Sweeter

Distracting people away from the taste of their drink could lead to more drinking.

New research suggests that loud environments lead people to think that alcoholic beverages taste sweeter than they actually are, perhaps explaining why people drink so much at clubs and concerts. Dr. Lorenzo Stafford at the U.K.'s University of Portsmouth undertook the study after anecdotal evidence (...) led him to believe that there might be a relationship between volume and how much people drink. So, he gave test subjects a selection different kinds of alcoholic beverages and subjected them to one of four levels of loudness, ranging from near silence to a nightclub. (Get free booze to listen to music? Sounds like our kind of research.)The subjects in louder, more distracting environments routinely ranked their alcoholic beverages to be sweeter in taste than subjects in quieter environments. Since humans have a natural preference for sweet-tasting things, Stafford concluded that loud music and other distractions might be taking drinkers' attention away from how their beverage actually tastes, thus leading to more alcohol consumption. Our personal experience sort of bears this out, although we always figured we drank more in loud clubs because it gives our hands and mouths something to do instead of trying to carry on impossible-to-comprehend conversations. We might need to test Stafford's findings in the field, though, but strictly in the interest of scientific rigour.