Honestly, I've never tasted a difference, and I used to drink a lot of beer, both in quantity and variety. Once again, it's a bit mixed. Aluminum is harsher for the environment to make outright than glass, but when you look at quantity recycled in raw numbers, energy used, and amount of materials recovered, things get interesting again. As a result of bauxite mining's environmental toll, manufacturing a 12-ounce aluminum can is twice as energy-intensive as making a similarly sized glass bottle: 2.07 kilowatt hours of electricity for the can vs. 1.09 kilowatt hours for the bottle. But those figures assume that the materials used in the containers are 100 percent virgin—that is, entirely lacking in recycled content. The average beer can contains 40 percent recycled aluminum, while American beer bottles are typically composed of 20 percent to 30 percent recycled glass. But the energy savings that accumulate when you recycle a ton of aluminum are far greater than they are for glass—96 percent vs. a mere 26.5 percent. So if your brewery uses cans that contain lots of secondhand aluminum, the bottle's environmental edge narrows considerably. That edge vanishes if your beer is trucked across several states. Without its liquid payload, the average beer can weighs less than an ounce, while an empty bottle clocks in at close to 6 ounces. That disparity makes a real difference in terms of overall greenhouse-gas emissions, since heavier items require more fuel to transport.Cans taste like cans.
And the argument that aluminum recycles better than glass is pure bullshit. You melt glass. You purify aluminum.