During the planning of WOW’s 25th-anniversary exhibition, the company’s president asked the team, “What do you want to do?” Designer and director Saki Kato came up with the idea of brewing beer and distributing it as a souvenir to exhibition visitors. Since the exhibition was titled “Unlearning the Visuals,” the project adopted “UNLEARN” as its central theme, aiming to reconsider the very concept of taste perception. Rather than simply producing an original beer, the team focused on the relationship between taste and visuals, leading to the creation of an interactive project.

While people can say things like “This tastes good” or “I like this flavor,” accurately describing taste details can be challenging. The team designed a way for participants to express their sensory experience visually while drinking beer. Through an intuitive interface, users could place various colors and shapes on a digital canvas, creating a unique beer label that could be printed.

During preliminary workshops, the team researched which colors and shapes best represent different tastes. They found that people tend to choose vivid colors over muted tones and that flavors often blend rather than remain distinct. To reflect this, the app incorporated bright colors and a special effect that allowed users to adjust color boundaries, making their taste impressions more accurate.

A diverse team contributed to this project, including planners, producers, engineers, and even WOW’s most passionate beer enthusiast. The brewing was entrusted to VERTERE, a brewery in Okutama, Japan. The beer was designed to emphasize aromatic complexity, offering evolving flavors depending on temperature while maintaining a balanced alcohol content (5–6%) for accessibility.

For printing, the team used a custom-built machine that integrated a printer to generate labels. This feature was not only about visually expressing taste but also about allowing participants to take home a personalized souvenir of their experience.

“UNLEARN BEER” was a highlight of the exhibition, drawing long lines at peak times. Many participants—especially those unfamiliar with craft beer—appreciated the opportunity to pause and reflect on their own taste perceptions, experiencing a novel connection between sight and taste. Taste is inherently subjective, but packaged food and beverages often feature clear-cut visuals that influence consumers' flavor perception—a phenomenon known as “cross-modal effects.” This project encouraged people to reconsider their personal sensory experiences, fostering a more authentic connection with their taste impressions.

The concept could extend beyond beer to other food items like chocolate or coffee. Kato expressed interest in further exploration: “I’d love to see how different visual expressions emerge from other beers. I'm also curious about representing taste through poetry or naming rather than visuals.” Future updates may bring even more innovation to this playful intersection of taste, creativity, and expression.