Sunday, April 10, 2011

How important is size for you?

Well, the bottle size poll has now closed. The question was “At what strength do you prefer beers in 330ml bottles rather than 500ml?” There were 79 responses, broken down as follows:

5.0% or lower: 10 (13%)
5.5%: 11 (14%)
6.0% : 12 (15%)
6.5% : 4 (5%)
7.0% : 14 (18%)
7.5% : 8 (10%)
8.0% : 2 (2%)
8.5% or higher: 18 (23%)

So a long way from a “normal” distribution there – as Phil said in the comments, “the spread of answers to this one *really* surprised me - you could get pretty much the same thing by rolling a dice.” Basically, there seem to be three groups:

  1. People who think 330ml is an acceptable bottle size for beers of quite moderate strength that you might well drink a pint of in the pub
  2. Those who think there should be a clear cut-off point around the 7.0% or 7.5% mark, above which increasing strength does make the smaller bottle size sensible. I went for 7.5%, by the way
  3. Those who think that everything should be available in pints, or near pints, and possibly dismiss all those who disagree as wimps. These formed the biggest single group - and I know included both The Hearty Goodfellow and Tyson
Discuss...

Bear in mind this was intended to refer to British or German beers that you might reasonably expect to find in both sizes, not those that by tradition are always sold in the smaller size.