We don’t fully understand why some people are more attractive to mosquitoes, but two decades of studies has found that some mosquitos are partial to the taste of beer.

Here’s the deal…

If you’ve ever cracked open a cold one at a summer 0uting only to find yourself covered in itchy welts, you’re not imagining things—science is finding that mosquitoes really do like beer drinkers.

A handful of studies over the last two decades have pointed to an unusual connection between alcohol consumption and mosquito attraction. One of the most-cited experiments, conducted in Burkina Faso in 2010, found that participants who drank a single liter of beer were significantly more likely to attract mosquitoes than those who drank water.

Those researchers didn’t  exactly pin down why, but they suspected it had something to do with changes in body odor, body temperature, or carbon dioxide output—mosquitoes’ three favorite homing beacons.

“It could be that alcohol alters skin chemistry in subtle ways that make drinkers smell tastier,” says Dr. Laura Harrington, an entomologist at Cornell University who studies mosquito behavior. “Mosquitoes use a very complex set of cues, so even slight shifts can make a difference.”

Another possible factor, and a more obvious one at that, is that beer drinkers tend to hang out outdoors in the evenings, prime mosquito hours. Add in a raised body temperature from the booze itself, and you’ve got a bug buffet in the making.

In 2023 Dutch researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen put a theory to the test, conducted an experiment on beer fans attending the three-day Lowland music festival in the Netherlands.

According to New Atlas, the researchers built an on-site pop-up lab out of shipping containers at the festival, which held custom cages filled with thousands of female mosquitoes…

“The researchers recruited 465 festival-goers to be part of the experiment, which involved a hygiene and event-behavior survey, a breathalyzer reading, and a practical test requiring participants to put their left arms against the wall of a transparent cage housing 20–35 female insects. Then a camera tracked how many mosquitoes landed near the skin compared to a sugar feeder on the adjacent side of the cage.”

And what the research team  found was that people who had drank beer in the previous 12 hours were 35% – more attractive to the mosquitoes than those who didn’t.

But before you swear off beer in the summer, keep in mind: the effect isn’t universal.

Not all beer drinkers get bitten more, and other factors—like genetics, sweat composition, blood type, and even whether you’ve recently showered—can play a bigger role than beer in whether mosquitoes zero in on you.

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