New York City Blind Rating – Gueuze

Everybody on this website has a favourite beer… they are clearly listed on our profiles and all of us can remember the time and place where we had that perfect beer.  For me, I can distinctly recall the feeling of satisfaction of cracking a bottle of Westy 8 while looking over downtown Vancouver after receiving my Ph.D… it was a perfectly sunny spring day and the beer itself was a gift from my then girlfriend (current wife).  I felt like I was on top of the world and the beer itself tasted like manna from heaven, but how much of that perception is fuelled by things that are not in the glass?  Recently, a small group of New York City Ratebeerians gathered at my house in Queens, in order to try to answer this question with a collection of traditional gueuze.

This was an experiment that Andy (puzzl) and I  had been talking about doing it for the better part of a year, so we finally decided to just do it.  We gathered together a collection of 8 bottles of readily available gueuze, currently available for sale around New York City.  These included the following:

Boon Mariage Parfait (Bottle in 2003); Cantillon Gueuze (Bottled October 30, 2008); Drie Fonteinen Oude Gueuze (Bottled February 2, 2007); Girardin Gueuze Black Label (bottling date unknown); Hanssens Oude Gueuze (bottling date unknown); Lindemans Gueuze Cuvée René (Bottled August 11, 2007); Oud Beersel Oude Geuze (Bottled June 4, 2008); and St. Louis Gueuze Fond Tradition (Bottled June 20, 2008).

In addition to these traditional gueuzes, a last minute addition consisted of Cantillon 50˚N 4˚E

All of the bottles were chilled to fridge temperature, then removed from the fridge and opened twenty minutes before sampling in order to let the beers breathe a bit before sampling.  Two of the tasters’ significant others, (thanks Pearl and Jess), served as bartenders and they randomized the sampling and ensured that all of the samples were equivalent to one another.  While all of the tasters knew what was in the lineup (except the Cantillon 50˚N 4˚E, which was only known to Paul (dickinsonbeer) who brought it, we did not know the order they were coming out in.  Each round consisted of two different beers, sampled in matching glassware and the rounds were twenty minutes apart.  People rated on the Ratebeer scale, but also gave numerical scores from 1 to 9 (best to worst) in order to eliminate any difference that may exist due to an individual rater having a fairly large spread.

One of the most interesting parts of this tasting was hearing people’s reactions to a beer, without any previous knowledge of what the beer in the glass is.  In the first round, there were a few nods as people were thinking, “Yeah, I totally know what these are, piece of cake”.  Progressing to round two, there were a few strange looks around the room, and I realized that I didn’t have a clue what I was drinking.  By round three, I’m convinced that everyone realized that they were screwed and had no clue what each beer was.  When you drink these beers alone, it’s very easy to pick out some distinguishing character… notes of lemon, or cheese, or must… but when they are being tasted in series like this, you get similar notes in a lot of the beers, but the differences are in levels of each one.  I figured drinking in parallel would make it easier to distinguish them, but it reality it made it harder.  I gave up guessing after round three, but a few other people kept trying to muddle through.

At the end of the tasting what was obvious to me was that the blind tasting definitely made me less likely to award a high score.  Of the 9 beers sampled, I had rated 8 of them previously, some many, many times.  However my blind ratings ranged from 2.8 to 4.1 while my recorded ratings ranged from 3.3 to 5.0.  This seemed to be a common feature for the other raters as well, although I don’t really have a good explanation for why that might be.

So, we come to the results.  I’ve posted all of the data here, so that any of you number crunchers who may have a better way of interpreting this data can take a crack at it.

The only real consensus that came out of this was the the Cantillon 50˚N 4˚E was the worst of the lot.  Every rater picked it at their least favourite of the tasting.  Although the  Lindemans came out in front, only a single person picked it as their number one and the gueuze with the most number one votes was the Hanssens, with two raters choosing it as their favourite.

I’m not sure what the lesson here is, but I can tell that it is a huge eye-opener to see how something as simple as seeing a beer’s label totally affects one’s ability to enjoy/experience a beer fully.  That, and blind rating is loads of fun and a great way to see how your palate matches up to your expectations.  I encourage everyone out there to give it a try sometime… I guarantee you’ll be surprised.