The man in the pub is more discerning than you
That’s it. Hand in your pipes, shave off the beards and get rid of the beer nerd t-shirts the game is up. We are all at Irish Craft Brewer a mockery of a travesty of a sham as beer tasters. It turns out a random collection of pub goers were better at guessing what stout they were getting than we were.
Irene handed out trays of beers marked so only she knew what beer a particular tray was. A tray with a particular number always held the same beer. People were asked to put their beers in order of preference and also to name the beer. 45 voted on their favourite beer, most gave their preferences for all the beers and 35 also tried to guess the beer.
The collection consisted of four people from ICB, a few tourists, many random punters and three people from the breweries. It was very brave of the brewers to put their reputation on a line in a blind tasting, so Carlow and Hilden have to be commended for taking that risk.
The voting was a plurality with elimination system and the results were as follows:
| Round | Murphy’s | Guinness | Beamish | Molly’s | O’Hara’s | Comments |
| 1 | 6 | 14 | 9 | 7 | 9 | Murphy’s gone |
| 2 | – | 16 | 9 | 8 | 12 | Molly’s gone |
| 3 | – | 17 | 13 | – | 14 | Beamish gone |
| 4 | – | 25 | – | – | 18 | Guinness wins |
How about amongst women? There were 11 votes with female names on them
| Round | Murphy’s | Guinness | Beamish | Molly’s | O’Hara’s |
| 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 3 |
| 2 | – | 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| 3 | – | – | 3 | 4 | 4 |
| 4 | – | – | – | 6 | 5 |
So Molly’s Chocolate Stout seems to be the most popular beer amongst women. O’Hara’s was so close that a bigger sample size might alter the result.
81 stouts were guessed correctly. This is statistically significant. Sp people can name the stout at a better chance than random. Our previous attempts to name stouts in a blind tasting did not show ICB members were any better than a monkey throwing darts at a board, so we were beaten on that one.
The chances of guessing all five beers correctly at random is one in 125. Two people out of 35 did name all the pints though.
Murphys 11
Guinness 14
Molly’s 30
O’Hara’s 16
Murphy’s and Beamish being two Cork drinks and the test taking place in Dublin probably says something about why these beers were not recognised and scored low. Rerunning the test in Cork could be interesting. If the test was run again I would recommend recording peoples gender and getting people to circle their usual stout.
The brewers from Carlow and Hilden recognised their beer. Seamus O’Hara got all the beers correct. Thank you to everyone who took part and to The Beer Cellar and O’Neill’s for a fun night tasting beers. And congratulations to Diageo on producing Guinness the most popular beer.
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