"Traditional" Belgian Step Mash?

I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they are not bad beers. I think Marshall would fess up and say "12 of 17 tasters failed to find the odd beer out, but everyone agreed that both beers had a strong baby diaper thing going on, and that probably covered up any impact decoction mashing would have in the first place."

But your other problems are bound to be more valid. These experiments are never going to be good at measuring subtle distinctions and characteristics that people have varying sensitivities to.

I would like to see them repeated several times within the same panel. You could see if (1) the people who first found a difference got lucky and (2) see if the people who failed to find a difference gradually showed evidence that their palates learned to detect the difference. I often worry that a single tasting is not enough opportunity for subtle distinction.

 

I don't see a negative result in an exbeeriment as proving conclusively that there's no difference, but it does seem to be a data point suggesting an upper bound on how obvious the difference is likely to be (under similar conditions to the experiment). So in this case, if I kept trying to brew Helles and ending up with a nasty grainy mess then I wouldn't expect a Hochkurz mash to fix it, but if I felt like I was 99% there but wanted to really nail it then I might consider it as an extra thing to try.

 

I agree there is value to their results. But I often find myself trying to poke holes in their studies.

 

The manual Kunze wrote for the East German brewing schools is one of my favourite books. I especially like the bit saying what colour the labels had to be for each style.