Tag Archives: macro

Cider Tasting

Cider, ,

It may be fall in other places, but we’ve got a few more months of 80°+ weather ahead of us in Florida.  So we recently did a double-blind tasting of several bottles of cider we picked up at the grocery store.  They’re probably not as good as some of the cider we can get in New York (like Eve’s and Bellwether), but then that’s not really the reason I wanted to do a double-blind tasting.  I really had two main reasons:

  1. There’s so much snobbery around beer and cider, and so much of the market is driven more by image and brand than by taste — so I feel like it’s a good reality check to make sure I’m not just buying into that.
  2. I often find myself in a restaurant with only mass-marketed beers and ciders to choose from — so it’s really helpful to know which ones I like better, and if any of them are worth drinking.

The methodology was the same as our lager tasting: one of us poured the ciders into glasses and assigned them numbers, and the other mixed them up and assigned them numbers.  So neither of us knew which ciders were which while we were tasting them, and we revealed them afterwards.

Unlike our lager tasting, there were no big surprises.  We didn’t agree on the exact ordering, or exactly where the drinkable/undrinkable line was.  But we were in broad agreement and our rankings lined up pretty well with what we thought coming in to the tasting:

  • Both of us thought Redd’s Apple Ale and Woodchuck Summer were pretty bad.  Wind ranked Redd’s dead last and thought it was the only truly undrinkable one in the bunch (finding Woodchuck Summer strangely un-summer-y but barely passable).  I thought they were both terrible and thought Redd’s was slightly less terrible than Woodchuck Summer.
  • Neither of us liked Stella Cidre or Woodchuck Granny Smith very much.  But they were definitely better than Redd’s and Summer.  I found Stella Cidre to be strangely mineral tasting, and we both agreed there was not much flavor at all.  The Granny Smith was at least crisp and dry, but still just not much there.
  • Strongbow Gold and Angry Orchard Crisp were the clear winners.  Strongbow is much juicier and Angry Orchard is much drier, but we both found them very drinkable.

With that in mind, I’m tempted to do another round, using Strongbow and Angry Orchard as controls for whatever craft cider we can find around town.  Though it would be hard to do a blind test of our favorite cider (Julian’s Cherry Bomb) since its strong red color would obviously give it away.

Double-Blind Lager Test

Beer, , ,

So if you’re looking at my Twitter or Untappd feed and wondering if I’ve been replaced by aliens, or lost a bet, or something, I assure you there’s a more reasonable explanation.  No, instead we decided we should do a taste test of all the crap lager we could find at convenience stores.  For example, if I’m stuck at a party/restaurant/bar/whatever and they’ve only got Bud Light and Corona, which should I pick?  Probably neither, but if I really want a beer to go with those tacos, would it make any discernible difference which one I chose?  Inquiring minds want to know.

I know that brand perceptions and other biases play a big factor, so I knew that a regular tasting wouldn’t cut it.  So we decided to do a double-blind taste test so neither of us would know which beer was which when we were tasting them.

The Lineup

I started with a list of the top 20 best-selling beers (sorry, it’s a slideshow, but that’s the list I used).  Then I went to a couple of local convenience stores to see which ones I could actually find in single cans (I cheated a little and bought a 4-pack of PBR because of the hipster factor).  And for good measure, I included Cigar City’s Hotter Than Helles as a “control” beer that I have actually drunk on purpose, and found decent.  So I wound up with all of the top 6 beers, plus a smattering of other top 20 beers — I’ve added their sales ranking and brewery ownership:

  • Bud Light (#1, AB-InBev)
  • Coors Light (#2, MillerCoors)
  • Budweiser (#3, AB-InBev)
  • Miller Lite (#4, MillerCoors)
  • Natural Light (#5, AB-InBev)
  • Corona Extra (#6, AB-InBev/Constellation)
  • Heineken (#10, Heineken)
  • Miller High Life (#11, MillerCoors)
  • Natural Ice (#14, AB-InBev)
  • Pabst Blue Ribbon (#17, Pabst)
  • Cigar City Hotter Than Helles (unranked, Cigar City)

Price is not a big factor for me when I choose my beer.  But I found it interesting to see the price differentiation.  The beer cost about $28 total.  At the high end, a 6-pack of Hotter Than Helles cost $11 ($1.83/can), the singles cost $13.50 ($1.50/can most of them were $1.19/can, and a few were $2/can because they were 24 oz.), and a 4-pack of PBR cost $3.60 (90¢/can).  And the Hotter Than Helles cans were 12 oz., as opposed to the 16-24 oz. cans at the convenience stores.  The PBR would probably be closer to the other singles if it wasn’t in a multi-pack.

Methodology

I had two main goals for the tasting process: taste a lot of beers to get a broad sample, and avoid knowing which ones were which.  I also wanted Wind and I to be tasting the same beers at the same time, so we could discuss them as we went.  So we came up with this process:

  1. We rounded up all the taster and juice glasses in the house.  We had 11 beers, so we had to dig into the high cabinets to get 22 small glasses.
  2. Wind left the room while I gave each beer a number (the slips of paper in the photo above), poured two glasses, and wrote down the beer-to-number mapping.
  3. I left the room and Wind replaced the numbers with randomized letters, wrote down the number-to-letter mapping, and rearranged the beers in order by their letter.
  4. We tasted the beers and rated/ranked them.
  5. We then consulted our mappings to figure out which beer was which.

Findings

The first thing we noticed was the color, or rather lack thereof.  Looking at the table full of tasting glasses, the color differences were minimal, and mostly attributable to the glasses or lighting.  So we’re definitely talking about pale yellow fizzy stuff.

The second thing we noticed was that there were actually differences between the beers.  Some had a very pronounced lager twang, but others didn’t.  Some of them had a little aroma, but others had absolutely none.  Some had honey-like sweetness or even a touch of maltiness, while others had basically no taste at all.  Some were very highly-carbonated or astringent like wheat, while others were smooth and clean.

By the time we were half-way through, it was obvious we were not going to agree on ranking the beers.  In particular, I rather liked the beer that wound up being PBR and found Bud Light to be middling, but Wind hated both of them.

That said, we were in complete agreement that Heineken was clearly the worst (which is pretty amusing since back in the days when we didn’t particularly like beer, Heineken was the main beer we did drink).  We also agreed on most of the bottom tier, too: Natural Light, Miller Lite, and Coors Light.

We also mostly agreed on the top of our rankings: 4 of our top 5 were the same, though in different orders: Corona, Budweiser, Hotter Than Helles, and, surprisingly, Natural Ice.  It was somewhat reassuring that we both included Hotter Than Helles in our favorites, though it’s worth noting that neither of us could pick it out of the lineup, and neither of us ranked it higher than third place.  This definitely confirmed my suspicion that a blind tasting was needed here.