[staticautomatic]

This reminds me of something I encountered when I used to work in a wine store, which was a sort of copper wand that you would place in a glass of wine and it would "age" the wine. At first I assumed this was snake oil bullshit, but after some research, it turned out there was actually a well documented reaction whereby (IIRC) copper catalyzes the conversion of alcohols into certain ketones and aldehydes, mimicking part of the natural oxidation process.

[Florin_Andrei]

If you really care about fine nuances of taste, drinking almost anything from metal cups has pretty clear effects. Not aluminum, but things like brass or even various iron alloys. Especially if the drink is slightly acidic.

Regular "food" and "drinks" tend to be pretty complex chemical cocktails, so no wonder they have strange reactions with anything even remotely inclined to react chemically.

Now I wonder if the taste of the original Turkish coffee is related in small part to the usage of tiny copper pots for making it.

[Balgair]

Yes this is typically why European foods are thought to be less acidic in taste, the issue was the pewter dinnerware of the aristocracy. Tomatoes were blamed for a while, but all acids will allow the leaching out of lead from the pewter into the food and then usually death followed. Romans actually used this technique to sweeten foods and usually wine. To extend this to the use of general metal ware is straightforward. Though not lead, necessarily, I am sure that heated/acidic drinks will do something to the food taste, and maybe not just via leaching. Egg white, whipped in a copper bowl, will stand up much longer and are more satin-y than in other bowls. It would be most interesting to compare the different metals and choose the ones that most exemplify the desired results; hopefully not lead poisoning though.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-the-tomato-wa...

http://io9.gizmodo.com/5877587/the-first-artificial-sweetene...