Blind IPA taste test design

lol

 

My brother, my wife, and I do pumpkin beer blind tasting every year. We set them all up, label the cups, and shuffle them around. We each have a piece of paper and rate them 1-10 as we drink them and make a quick note on each one. We find it pretty easy to rank that way.

 

If you aren't splitting this into about five or six different sessions. You will be wasting well over half of what you are pouring, and your friends might as well be drinking dishwater due to the extreme palate fatigue they will have after the third or fourth one, and it will turn into a drinking for the sake of drinking fest. Not a good way to represent what you consider world class IPA's.
if you are still plowing forward with only 1 or 2 sessions. Have an awful lot of bland boring white bread, and unsalted white bland boring crackers on hand, and be prepared to spend all day on it because a good analysis of beer is at least a ten minute endeavor PER serving, and then factor in palate reset time. Which is about an hour or two. Oh, yeah. No perfume for the ladies, no smelly body goop for the men, and definitely no cigarettes, cigars, etc. for anyone because all of the aforementioned negatively impact what you are trying to accomplish.

 

I would definitely add a few lower rated beers in the mix sort of as a control. Its also interesting data to see how much better great beers really are.

 

It would be awesome if something from Harpoon or Longtrail beat all the giants.

We run tests for not beer tasting but other projects and while this is more for fun if you want to get real data you need consistency. So everyone has to try the same beers in the same order with the same palette cleansers between them. Any little thing can affect the taste.

A step further would be a real blindfolded test as you can't rely on recognizing the color or how a beer pours. You can only rely on your taste and smell. Some people are good enough to pick out a specific beer just by smelling. Not me.

 

White serving glasses with red tips?

White serving glasses with red tips?

 

Don't spill

 

All green was awesome but it's gotta be past it's prime now (5-6 weeks?). As others mentioned, have fun with it but you should try to do everything fresh so it's an equal opportunity event lol.

 

Blind tastings give weird results. I remember one that involved wine experts, where they filled $200 bottles with box wine. The reviews were amazing. I'd throw a cheapo beer from the grocery store in there just for fun.

 

Too many options. 18 different ones? I know its a weekend but that seems like too many. Even breaking up the sessions will leave you apples to oranges. Perhaps blindly do 6 in a session and rank within sessions. Comparing b/w sessions will be difficult.

 

I'd bet on Susan, it's a great beer.

 

This might be further down the rabbit hole than its worth going, but it could be fun to try and tease apart the order effects a little bit by giving each person a unique order. If you notice the last couple beers served consistently getting lower ratings than the first few, even though the beers are different for everyone, you'll get a sense of how much of a factor palate fatigue is. And if everyone picks the same beer as their favorite regardless of order, that's a more impressive display of preference.

I also second the idea of including a "boring" ringer or two. It adds an element of danger to see if we're really as discerning as we think we are