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Condensation On Your Beer != Good
An anonymous reader writes "Turns out that condensation on your favorite chilled beverage is a bad thing for keeping it cold. Two researchers conducted an experiment in their bathroom proving that condensation can raise the temperature of your beer by nine degrees!"
The condensation pays a latent heat penalty, warming the beer when the beer is super cold. But conversely the evaporation pays back the latent heat penalty at some higher temperature. Where the equilibrium point is I'm not sure.
But there is an easy solution to this problem: mist the outside of your beer glass with cold water. This will tie up all the condensation nucleation sites without paying the latent heat penalty.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Most beer shouldn't be ice cold to begin with. Good beer at least. I agree with your sentiments about the mass market fizzy piss they call beer though.
Even easier. If you don't drink BMC (Bud/Miller/Coors), there's no need to keep it so damn cold to kill the taste.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Because they aren't as expensive to make and reasonably easily replicated by someone else who will sell it cheaper?
Take your $500 bottle of scotch. It's probably aged for 25 or 30 years. So if I decided to make a competitor it would take me 25 years from when I started to bring it to market. And on every one of those 25 years I'd have to decide "I won't sell it all this year and make some money to pay the bills, I'll instead age it some more".
Though I suspect the real answer is that wine and whiskey snobbery are off the charts. A $500 bottle of wine is quite possibly nicer than a $25 bottle of wine - it's not $475 nicer though. Wine just happens to be a luxury good that people use to show off wealth and hence the wealthy will spend a lot of money on it just so that everyone knows they have a lot of money. Beer doesn't have that status and hence people won't pay such ridiculous sums for it.
That doesn't mean that "premium" beer isn't much better than "non-premium" beer. In fact it's a great thing for people who happen to like "premium" beers.