Why are there so many bubbles in your pint?

‘Why are there so many bubbles in your pint?’ and ‘What’s the tallest straw you can drink out of?’ are two of the questions that London pub goers will encounter on their beer mats from today.

The Institute of Physics initiative is running for the next four weeks in pubs throughout North and Central London with the aim of igniting discussions about the physics of drink.

Based on research by physicists at the Institute of Food Research in Norwich, the questions, including ‘How does wearing lipstick affect your beer drinking?, aren’t immediately obviously about physics.  But by stimulating conversations, observations and in some cases even experimentation, the questions soon show what physics has to do with it.

Pub goers are able to text to find out whether they’ve worked out the right answer and are encouraged to go to www.physics.org/food-physics to discover more links between what we drink and cutting-edge physics research.

Caitlin Watson, Physics in Society Manager at the IOP, said “Many people think that physics was just something they had to do at school and is of no relevance to their lives.  But by highlighting, in an entertaining way, how the drink that we all love is connected to physics, we hope to show that it is not only relevant but accessible to all.”