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Physics

A single pint of beer contains up to 2 million bubbles

By Karina Shah

26 April 2021

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Tilting a beer glass while pouring can reduce the amount of bubbles that form

DusanBartolovic/Getty Images

When beer is poured into a 500-millilitre glass, somewhere between 200,000 and 2 million bubbles rise to the surface to form the foamy head.

This estimate was made by Gérard Liger-Belair and Clara Cilindre at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne in France, who calculated the number of tiny bubbles that form before a lager goes flat.

The researchers first measured the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in 250 millilitres of lager after it was …

Article amended on 26 April 2021

We corrected the size of the glass used in these experiments

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