> switching from drinking beer out of bottles because it "tastes better"
FWIW, that was never true, anyway. It's just that, once upon a time, cheap beer came in cans and expensive beer came in bottles, so it was hard for consumers to make a decent comparison.
When I was in beer judging class, we did an interesting blind taste test among various beers that are available in both bottles and cans. The cans consistently won. It didn't take too long to notice the pattern, either: At least for beers with a more delicate flavor, the bottled version tends to have a certain subtle hint of soggy cardboard that's absent in the canned version.
You can't frost a can of beer but you can frost a glass of beer and it absolutely tastes better and has an effect on enjoyability. But for what its worth, why is it harmful to put glass in the landfill? Glass is made from silica. It's non toxic.
I think the real wastefulness of glass probably comes from its manufacture and use much more than its disposal. It takes a lot of energy to make - compared to aluminum, the melting point is very high and you need a relatively large mass of it to make a container. And its extra weight also means that you'll burn a lot more oil in shipping products in glass containers.
A lot of that could be mitigated by finding products that are bottled locally in reusable bottles. I don't know about other countries, but that's become all but illegal in many US jurisdictions.
re: frosting, it really depends on how how you like your beer. If it's an American pale lager like Miller or Budweiser, where the defining feature of the style is that it's meant to have as little flavor as possible, yeah, a frosted glass will help with that. As will a bottle, since bottles are perfect for minimizing your nose's exposure to what you're drinking. If it's an ale that's meant to have a lot of complex flavor and aroma, and you like those things, cellar temperature will bring them out more.
The melting point notion is throwing you off -- manufacturing new aluminum requires way more energy than glass. The reason people will pay you to recycle aluminum is because of the huge differential in (electricity) cost between making new aluminum vs. recycling aluminum. The energy differential between making new steel vs recycling steel is about 2:1. For aluminum, it's 20:1. This is because making aluminum involves first melting bauxite ore, then running a shit-ton of current through it to perform electrolysis.
In the test you described, I presume the beer has been poured into a glass, like the OP states they now do. If you skip this step, drinking out of a can can have a distinctly metallic taste (imagine that), which is why I -- and I imagine many others -- tend to think beer tastes better out of a bottle than a can.
> At least for beers with a more delicate flavor, the bottled version tends to have a certain subtle hint of soggy cardboard that's absent in the canned version.
Canning is generally considered to be a better packaging method for beverages when it comes to flavor preservation, as opposed to bottling. Bottles allow light in, which leads to unwanted flavors developing in the beverage.
FWIW, that was never true, anyway. It's just that, once upon a time, cheap beer came in cans and expensive beer came in bottles, so it was hard for consumers to make a decent comparison.
When I was in beer judging class, we did an interesting blind taste test among various beers that are available in both bottles and cans. The cans consistently won. It didn't take too long to notice the pattern, either: At least for beers with a more delicate flavor, the bottled version tends to have a certain subtle hint of soggy cardboard that's absent in the canned version.
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