But why are cans and bottles different? Discuss.
It could be that the taste differs depending on what material you place your lips against while drinking - drinking from plastic bottles seems more comfortable than metal cans to me (and the latter is a better heat absorbant, usually feeling slightly colder when you touch it). To see if this could be the case, pour the drinks from a can and from a bottle into two glasses, let them have the same temperature and see if they taste different.
If they still do, It could be that canned and bottled Cokes have slightly different ingredients, to make them better suited to their plastic/aluminum envorinment. That's a very uneducated guess. :p
Or it could be self-deception. Do the above, pouring an equal amount of coke canned and bottled coke into two glasses. Have a friend randomly switch around the glasses with the help of a coin-flip while you're not looking (the friend should of course keep track of which is which). Then taste both of them and see if you can guess the right drink, and in the long run perform better than chance. If you can, I remain at my uneducated guess that the ingredients are slightly different in order to suit the container. Another guess would be that the aluminum or plastic reacts with the Coke somehow, marginally altering the drink over time (sounds more unlikely). But if you can't guess the right drink more than half of the time, I remain at the guess that it's due to the material of the container you drink from that creates the different tastes.
I drink sodas maybe a few times per year, never really liked the taste of carbonated drinks. When I was little, I always got "bubbles" in my nose when drinking them.
