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How cold a beer is has nothing to do with how it’s brewed and packaged and everything to do with whether and how long the consumer refrigerates it before drinking it. No thinking person would ever claim to like Beer Brand A more than Beer Brand B because Beer Brand A is colder. But beer advertisements aren’t geared toward thinking people—they’re geared toward thirsty people. Commercials that brag about beer’s coldness are a wildly unsubtle attempt to circumvent viewers’ rationality by appealing to their baser instincts. Whatever your level of media literacy, a bottle of beer that sheds fragments of ice as it’s slammed down on a countertop in slow motion looks pretty darn refreshing.
Plus, heavily emphasizing that Bud Light, for instance, is “colder than cold” encourages people to chill their beer as thoroughly as possible, which reduces the likelihood that they’ll ever find out just how bad Bud Light really tastes. As my colleague Mark Garrison reported in 2012, cold “masks the flaws of flavorless macrobrews.” At cold temperatures, beers don’t smell like anything, and they feel tinglier on the tongue, so their flavor is less noticeable.
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shaun james bockert 