Sorry, Dude, You’ve Been Drinking the Wrong Beer for Years...

I think most craft drinkers who have been at it for a while could pick out their favorites. If you've only had 15 IPAs, it may be a bit difficult. I think after having so many though, you start to really pick out the intricacies, especially of beers regular to your rotation. I drink a lot of FBS. I feel confident I could pick it out next to those of the same/similar styles. But who knows?

 

I stopped reading at "Instead, the experiments consisted of blind taste tests with three European lagers—Czechvar (Czech Republic), Heineken (Netherlands), and Stella Artois (Belgium)—in order simply to find out if beer drinkers could tell them apart."

 

IPA 'a would be relatively difficult, but stouts and sours wouldn't.

 

You probably have to get to the point where you find a 'tell', or a unique something that a certain beer has in your eyes that others don't. Many beers have them; most don't. It's usually just the overall balance, or personality, of the beer that we enjoy that attracts us. Still, that just means that we can pick the good stuff from the bad- so if you do find that there is another beer that fooled you in a blind tasting, then just be happy that you found another new fave .

 

I've done blind taste tests with several different beverages.

Soda: We did diet sodas up against full-on sugar sodas. 50% was the best anyone could do. (and that is with having the 8 soda's names)

Vodka: We did all kinds, we ranked them and then tried to pick them out of line-up. Again the best anyone could do was 50%, and the most expensive vodkas weren't necessarily the favorites.

Beer: I've done BMC and again the best wasn't all that high at 67%. Knew all of the beers in the taste test, but not which was which.

Beer: I've done craft with 8 common IPAs and 8 common DIPAs(common meaning that the majority of people testing had tasted these beers before some extensively). We didn't know any names. We had 10 year mad craft veterans and newbies alike. This one was rough. 25% was the best. We then gave out the names and still the best was at 60%.

Most of the guys thought they would be able to tell their favorites, but it isn't as easy as it seems.

 

Now that I've actually read the article , I'm thinking that I'd really like to try that triangulation test. I bet the way they did it (with the Euro-lagers) would be more difficult for even us here, than using other styles. If you were to do it with porters, for example, you'd really have to try to find extremely similar examples to make the test valid. Just grabbing random ones would probably make the oddball easy to pick out.

 

I really don't think it would. The article is like saying people tried three different commercial orange juice brands and couldn't tell the difference. I'm not saying I would absolutely be able to tell my favorite IPA apart from two other world-class IPAs, but then I'm not loyal to a particular IPA. And frankly I'd be happy to drink any of them. I don't think there are too many drinkers of great beer who are loyal to a specific brand, they just want to drink great beer no matter where it comes from.

 

"In the paper, the researchers first point to a classic 1964 study, in which a few hundred volunteer beer testers (probably wasn’t too hard to find folks willing to participate) were sent five different kinds of popular lager brands, each with noticeable taste differences according to the experts."

keywords:
1) 1964
2) popular lagers

ya .....


And the news study .... consisted of blind taste tests with three European lagers—Czechvar (Czech Republic), Heineken (Netherlands), and Stella Artois (Belgium)

Ya ... not shocking.

my challenge ....
Put 3 chocolate stouts in front of me wher eone is Brooklyn Berwary's. I will put the Brooklyn chcolate on top each time.

 

Triangle blind test is the way to go. One sample of one beer, two of a second, pick the one that's different in a blind test. A lot of folks are shocked, to put it mildly.

http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2...st-that-can-help-you-save-money/#.U-WOL2K9KSM

 

Then you didn't read enough to understand what is really involved.

 

I am confused, can you see the beer. I feel like I could pick out most of the top tier DIPAs based on clarity, color, lacing.

 

Not surprising.

Folks I know in service industry have/had regularly served alternative BMC when one tap was kicked, because people usually complained, ordered no beer, tipped low, etc. when told their preferred beer was unavailable. In the cases from those I know over several years, not once was the wrong beer being served ever noticed.

They can't taste the difference. They aren't drinking it for the taste.

Actually, it's pathetic on another level that is often overlooked (my example). These people have one, clear, faithful beer of choice. And they can't tell when something other than what they ALWAYS drink is being served to them. Do you think that if a craft beer drinker only drank Two Hearted that he could tell if Goose Island IPA was served to him instead? I think it far more likely.

 

Maybe stick with IPAs featuring the same hop. Since Two Heated features centennials, you could pair it up with either Stone IPA or Founders Centennial.

 

Bingo!

 

Thoughts? Well..., it depends.

First note that there are multiple ways of doing blind taste tests and the appropriate test to use depends in part upon the question one wants to answer.

Where this type of blind test would seem to be most useful is exactly the way it is used in the study described/referred to in the article. Very similar beverages which may or may not only be differentiated by marketing or other factors having little to do with flavor.

Without the opportunity to actually put this (and other blind tests) to work with a wide variety of craft beers (this would be pretty expensive so I don't foresee it happening :-) ), I'd hazard a guess in advance that this test could be used to show whether or not some different style categories differ in name only or not, e.g., the classic fuzzy line between porter and stout which some claim are differentiated by "roasted malt" and others disagree, or the difference, say, between IPA and DIPA, or between a Dortnumber and an Helles. However, I'd pretty much expect there to be pretty clear differentiation between, say, Gueuze and Tripel or APA.

Within a style category it could be used to look at things like are people really able to distinguish between the different beers emphasizing Centennial Hops (as suggested by @TongoRad ), or between different examples of a German style Pils. It might even be possible to use this particular type of blind taste test to move up on the classic debates that rage on here once in a while. Such as the debates about whether or not US brewed examples of Belgian or German styles are or are not distinguisable from Belgian or German brewed examples of the same styles, or whether Trappist ales are qualitatively different than the non-Trappist versions.