The New Yorker article "The Ketchup Conundrum" has an analysis that might be applied to beer. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/09/06/the-ketchup-conundrum The article describes the early 1970s mustard market as essentially a single brand, French's. Grey Poupon promoted a different flavor. That started a small revolution in mustard. Now we have a proliferation of mustard choices. This is a development similar to the explosion of the craft beer market. The article suggests that balance and integrated flavor are the characteristics that dominate ketchup preference (Heinz), while varying personal consumer tastes drive the variety of mustards. Specialty ketchup hasn't caught on. Heinz still dominates the market. This behaves more like the American adjunct lager AAL market. In the beer world the AAL brands being sold have proliferated but the flavor profiles remain in a narrow band, similar to the ketchup shelf at the store. The article notes the importance of an integrated and balanced flavor in most food preferences, giving the examples of Coke and Pepsi. Integrated and balanced flavor are both important to me in my beer choices. But I'm less choosy about balance among malt body, hop flavor and bitterness, and more sensitive to the integrated experience from tip of the tongue to aftertaste. .
Just as an aside, there is a small, but growing, selection of 'artisan' (perhaps Craft?) ketchups on the market these days.
This reminds me of when Stone first opened their pub, they refused to provide Ketchup. I think there were stories of people smuggling little Ketchup packets in. Greg Koch wrote an article that’s too long for me to reread right now: https://www.stonebrewing.com/blog/philosophy/2014/death-red-devil#intro
Huh. We always bought Gulden's Spicy Brown when I was a kid in the '70s, and IIRC -- it was in glass, not plastic. Not sure where their research came from, but such is the nature of today's* "journalism." (*or 2004's. )
Beer and mustard connoisseur. Maybe it's because I grew up in close proximity to Wisconsin. https://mustardmuseum.com/
My short summary didn't capture all the content of the article, so my "journalism" might be to blame. The article discussed the analysis of taste testing. In the beer world one method would be to determine a most preferred taste among competitors (Bud vs. Coors) versus the identification of subgroups with particular preferences (AAL vs. German Helles vs. stout vs. IPA vs. . . . ) I was buying Andeker, Augsburger, Ballantine XXX, and McSorleys in the 70s. There were niche brands then in beer too, but you can't deny that the AALs dominated the market (and still do).
