Comments on: New York City Blind Rating – Gueuze

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:02:08 +0000

We did them in the same order although none of us actually talked about the beers as we were sampling them.

By: Vertical Bacon Strips

Vertical Bacon Strips — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 04:02:57 +0000

I did a blind tasting with aged Trappist beers once – we had someone not doing the tasting bring us our selections in bottom marked glasses and placed them in front of us in different orders. Did you guys do the same or were all the raters sampling the same beers in the exact same order?

By: Joe

Joe — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:17:44 +0000

@BMan1113VR – I’ve got no idea why that particular bottle came in low – all of the raters have had it before and many really liked it. The RB posted average for this beer for the 6 people who have ratings posted is 4.1 and the lowest of those is mine at 3.8, so there is a huge discrepancy there. I do know that a number of us actually made a note of how poor it was, so I can only assume that we had a bad bottle in the tasting.

By: BMan1113VR

BMan1113VR — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:38:43 +0000

Very nice article. I have tried stuff like this before, but not with lambics yet. I don’t think I could tell the difference between a lot of these blind (with the exception of the Rene and possibly the Hanssens for their barnyard extreme and acid extreme respectively). Would love to try this some time, as well as the 50N4E (in general). Btw, any idea why that scored so low? Difference in the barrel (cognac), or just a bad bottle?

By: mrrain

mrrain — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:11:26 +0000

My friends and I were doing this same experiment on a monthly basis, starting with pumpkin beers. We’ve even done it with vodka. We found that rating too many of same types of beer became tedious. It was better to mix up the types. We’d do two lights, two mediums and two darks. It was also important to keep the samples small and discourage people from drinking between samples. After the sampling… let it all out!!

By: Belgo

Belgo — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:36:44 +0000

Blind tastings do have a tendency to make taster more careful about giving high scores.

This is a known phenomenon amongst wine tasters. Nobody wants to look silly, awarding a perfect score to something that is commonly seen as an average product.

For some reason nobody thinks they look silly if they give a low score to something considered a great product; that just means, that the taster is “not affected by what’s on the label”…….

By: haukur

haukur — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 07:58:23 +0000

envious!!!!