Put your stout where your mouth is?

Could you name four draught stouts if you were not told what each was? People on the Irish Craft Brewer site were pretty confident.

Rossa: myself and a friend did the 3 main stouts before in a hotel bar in cork. easy enough to tell them apart

Sbillings: I would say I could do the stouts.

When the 30th July in O’Neill’s on Suffolk Street, Dublin was set for the test people started to hedge their bets rapidly:

Sbillings: Would “gah!, it’s all bloody nitro stout” hurt the statistical analysis?

TheBeerNut: Oh, it’s a bad half-pint. [Insert stout here] doesn’t normally taste like that. It’s probably because they don’t serve much, the lines you know.

All of a sudden all nitro stouts might as well be served through a dishcloth for all the taste they provided.

The test was run a few times as new people arrived. The new people hid in the snug as the tester brought back the four stouts O’Neill’s serves on draught in turn from the bar. The stouts were labeled A, B, C, and D in the order they arrived. All the glasses used were of the same type. The participant had to name A B C and D. The stout order of each group was randomised.

When everyone had done the tasting the results were totted up, announced and then the mocking commenced. The results are shown in the table below. Blue shows when someone got the answer correct. Stouts in black show what the person guessed instead of the correct stout.

I’d love to claim my success was due to my amazing palate but to be honest it probably has more to do with my rugged good looks, winning charm and humble nature.

What did they taste like? It’s really easy to convince yourself after the event that you were certain exactly what everything was but these were my impressions: Guinness was sweet. O’Hara’s was rich and flavoursome. Murphy’s had some chocolate malt flavour. Beamish had a burnt taste. Many people mentioned they could detect the distinctive bitter taste of Beamish. Whether they were actually drinking Beamish did not affect when they said this statement.

On average we got 1.333 beers right out of 4. Picking entirely randomly you would get at least this right about one quarter of the time. So we cannot say that ICB members can identify stouts.

TheBeerNut: There are two bland stouts (Beamish and Guinness) and two flavorsome stouts (Murphy’s and O’Hara’s), and that picking between them is the hard bit.

People seem to be able to separate out Beamish and Guinness (B&G) from Murphy’s and O’Hara’s (M&O’H). We said something was B&G or M&O’H when it was 13 times and got it wrong 5 times. Picking at random this would happen less then one time in a hundred. This means that B&G and M&O’H seem to be two separate stout classes.

Sbillings: When I was presented with these beers, I chose the beer I liked most and equated that with the brand of beer I thought I liked most and so on.

Another interesting feature was how people’s own preferences affected how they choose. There might be a bias to associate the unpleasant with the one you “know” you don’t like and the pleasant with the one you “know” is your favourite.

The test was fun. People learned that blind tasting is much harder then you would think. I would recommend you try this just to see your prejudices tested. Thanks to all the willing guinea pigs.

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