How to pull a beer from the can so it tastes like it’s from a keg

Japanese senpai shares a drinking hack to make canned beer taste infinitely better. 

As the year draws to a close, people around Japan are enjoying year-end “bonenkai” parties with colleagues and various social groups, where drinking is par for the course to help people unwind and bond in a way they might not usually be able to.

That’s the situation our reporter Masanuki Sunakoma found himself in the other day, when he attended a bonenkai with friends, and it turned out to be a party he was glad he went to, because he ended up learning a hack that totally changed the way he drinks canned beer.

One of his senpai (seniors) at the party shared the hack with him, smiling with reddened cheeks as he demonstrated the new technique, sagely telling him, “Just do it like this and the beer will get darker and taste better.”

Since Masanuki was already tipsy, he couldn’t tell if the liquid really looked any different, but when he tried it, it did taste more delicious than usual, like a beer poured straight from the tap. Sure, the jovial mood might’ve added to the flavour, but it was a hack so good and so simple he couldn’t resist sharing it with us.

▼ All you need is a can of beer, a glass, and…

▼…a can opener.

The first thing you’ll want to do is use the can opener to pierce one side of the can, and then pierce the side opposite, as shown in the images below.

The next step is to tip the can into the glass so it sits on the rim and pours slowly through only one of the holes. The hole on the other side acts as an air hole.

Like pouring a good beer from a tap, this is a slow and steady process, so you can now sit back and simply watch your masterpiece being created.

Gazing at it like an hourglass, Masanuki could see fine-grained creamy bubbles forming on the head as the glass slowly filled with beer.

This technique pretty much does all the hard work for you, but you’ll want to keep an eye on the can as it empties to make sure it stays in place and doesn’t lose balance and topple off the glass, especially as you get to the last drops.

▼ Masanuki recommends holding the can as it becomes lighter.

While it’s much slower than simply pouring the beer out of the can as usual, it doesn’t take too long for the beer to be fully poured, and it’s well worth the wait, because in Masanuki’s opinion it makes for a much better beer.

▼ For one, the beer really does look darker than usual, and the bubbles in the head are noticeably finer.

While it looked great, what really matters to any beer lover like Masanuki is the flavour, and the resulting brew was completely transformed, tasting more like a draft beer served in a pub or a Japanese izakaya tavern. The texture and flavour were both so good that if you were to taste it blind, you’d never guess this was beer from a can.

It’s a technique that you can have fun refining too, because after trying it several times, Masanuki found that the size of the bubbles differed depending on the size of the hole. If the hole is too small, bubbles won’t form properly, and if the hole is too large, there’s no point in using a can opener as you’ll get the same result as pouring it out of the mouth of the can.

Once you get it just right, though, the results are truly amazing, so Masanuki highly recommends giving it a try next time you have a can of beer handy. It might change the way you drink canned beer forever, and it’ll definitely wow your friends and colleagues — junior or otherwise — at your next drinking party!

Photos ©SoraNews24
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