We all know the experience of buying a nice bottle of Coke, pouring it into a cup and that MF just foams up like crazy and out of the cup.
Other times, when we pour it slowly with an angle, NO FOAM! crazy stuff.
Why is that? What makes it foam or not foam?
In addition, you can poke the foam and not only does it stop foaming more, but the foam also dissipates much faster! HOW?! WHY?!
Man if this happened during the middle ages someone would be burned for witchcraft.
In: 1
Carbon dioxide is not quite bound to the water in soda. It is dissolved in it.
Because it is in solution, this weak bind is easy to break.
When you pour it roughly, it creates turbulance and actually mixes air into the sugar water mixture. The turbulance and the introduction if other gasses into solution can cause CO2 particles to find father other and stick together much easier than when the liquid is at rest.
Add to this using something like, say, a plastic cup with billions if micro abrasions to act as nucleation sites – that is – gathering points for the CO2 gas, you have a recipe for a lot of gas forming inside of the extra-viscous sugar water and foams up quickly.
Conversely, gently pouring along the side of a smooth glass would introduce little to no foam or extra bubbles if the glassn’ has few imperfections. The gentle pour introduces little turbulence or chances for other gasses to mix.
You may even find some imperfections by finding streams of bubbles seeming to come off of one point of the glass, almost single file in many cases, that is a small imperfection in the glass that’s making it easier for CO2 molecules to find each other!
Bonus!
Have you ever gotten water from the tap and it tastes crisp, yet some time later you go back and there are bubbles on the edge of the inside of the glass and it tastes… stale?
Well, if so, you might have an aerator for your faucet! It makes the stream highly turbulant, mixing air into the water as if it had fallen from a waterfall. Since air doesn’t stay mixed in water very well, it tends to go flat within a day, sometimes a few hours, I feel! But that last bit about the hours is anecdote.
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