Actually this has been one of those ideas that grows worse on you the more you think about it, but well, one has to do it some time and that time for me was last Friday.

The thing is, while one of couse has to have an opinion on beer flavours, the inevitable discussions that this causes does make one wonder to what extent the taste of beer is influenced by commercials and the general image you have of beer brands. So, the idea was to buy some different brands of beers and test them without knowing which was which. This actually serves a two-fold goal: first, you can find out which beers are the best, and secondly, you can test your beer knowledge by checking what beers you recognize.

The test setup

So, we bought two bottles of a whopping sixteen different kinds of beer: Amstel, Bavaria, Bitburger, Brouwmeester (the cheep Aldi brand), Dab (a German brand being served in bottles in de Gloppe, a cafe I go to often), Dommelsch, Grolsch, Heineken, Hertog Jan, Hoegaarden, Hollandia, Jupiler, Leeuw (served in Vera, Palm, Pitt (another cheep beer brand) and Warsteiner.

Now, we did the test with 5 persons (me, Mattijs, Vera, Sander B and Sander P), and each of us had a testing form on which we graded each beer for 5 different categories: aroma, looks (”uiterlijk”), taste (”smaak”) and taste afterwards (”nasmaak”), and a general judgement. Apart from that, we also tried to have a guess at which beer was which. The fill-in form, actually the standard Excel invoice template modified a little by me, can be found here (XLS) or here (PDF). The beer was being served by our lovely serving team Brenda, Elvira, Friso and Inonge (many thanks!) and we received about half a small glass of each beer to test and grade.

Problems

Of course, as could be expected with a lot of beer at hand, and in generally with badly prepared events such as this, some problems were to be expected. With the beer being served in our kitchen and there not being a door between the kitchen and the living room, of course one does tend to see some things some time, which is the reason why everybody guessed the fifth beer, Palm, right. After that, we moved to our closed veranda, which solved that problem.

Another problem is the inevitable cross-influencing one has on this kind of occasion. Sixteen beers is a lot, and no-one of us had actually tasted all beers previously, so when one person distinctly seems to recognize a beer, other people tend to go along with it. So, by tactically copying other people’s guesses one can cetrainly succeed in scoring some points. An example that springs to mind is the Hertog Jan that was giessed right by four out of five, and Vera guessing the Dab right while never actually having had the doubtful pleasure of tasting it.

A final observation is that sixteen beers is just about the number where the whole beer testing thing starts getting a bit boring and people tend to get a bit distracted. It’s just that when you go to the supermarket, there are just so many different kinds of beer that simply deserve to be tested so a selection of essential beers just doesn’t get much smaller.

Test results

Anyway, let’s jump-kick on to the results. As a true mathematician, I of course entered the results in a spreadsheed (graphs, tables and PDF exporting all done with the excellent OpenOffice.org Calc) and throwed some statistics on it to turn the numbers into answers. The resulting sheet can be found here (OOo calc format) or here (PDF). I’ll just go on to draw the most interesting conclusions from our little investigation.

First about our game at seeing who would guess most beers right. The results were a bit disappointing here, though I guess it was to be expected. Truth is, without practice beers are just very hard to distinguish.

I actually had two initial goals: guessing Hertog Jan and Dab. I have had only one bottle of Dab in my whole life, a few months ago, but it struck me having a particularly bad taste (bit of a sulfur-metallic combination), so I guessed I could recognize it, especially since Dab beer has become the archetype of bad beer for me. Hertog Jan, OTOH, is generally considered by us to be one of the best beers around, and a bit of an expensive one at that too, so I thought I ought to recognize it. I am quite proud to say I succeeded in both goals! At the negative side, I didn’t guess Amstel right, which is the beer we usually drink at home, so that was a bit disappointing.

Another interesting point was the Heineken Beer. It seems to be a hip thing nowadays to think of Heineken as having a very bad taste, and both Sander P and Vera suffered quite a bit from this before the test. While they not only didn’t recognize Heineken right, they also actually enjoyed drinking it: Vera gave it an average 6, and Sander P even gave it an above-average 6.5, ranking it at sixth place out of sixteen. Which I found quite funny. Seems that the Heineken myth is now proved to be not true.

Overall, the Challenge Cup (a beer glass with with the two lowest-ranked beers) went to Sander B, who guessed five beers right (including the forementioned Palm). I went second with four, and Sander P only succeeded in getting one beer right other than the Palm giveaway. Prooves the point that many beers are not easily distinguishable to me.

Let’s get on to the final judgement. Here’s the data in a neat table:

As you can see, kudoos go out to Bavaria for making the obviously winning beer, being the best in the aroma, taste, after taste and general categories, and being pretty cheap at that. It finishing above Hertog Jan (and way above, too) was quite a surprise for us. Closer examination learns that Vera was highly responsible for this though, giving Hertog Jan only 5.5 out of 10 whereas the rest of us gave it 7/10 or more. Still, even without that Bavaria would have won though.

Another interesting observation is the high, fourth, rank for Pitt, the second-cheapest beer in the test. Seems Pitt, mistaken for the high-end Jupiler and Leeuw twice, and costing only 70 cents per liter, is definitely going to replace Brouwmeester (10th place) as our low-end beer. That is, if I can’t help it, since I actually placed it on 14th place with a 4.5 grade…

Another thing is the low placement of Leeuw, the beer served in Vera, our favorite club in Groningen. Probably due to having had more than enough change to taste it due to Pooier 666 fame, Sander B and I gave it a 6 and 7, respectively, but the other grades were just plain bad, causing it to reach a disappointing 14th place.

About the last place, I can only say Dab deserved nothing better. I don’t know why this relatively expensive beer is being made at all, or why Sander P cared to give it a 5.5, but the average 2.8 for aftertaste pretty much tells the whole story of this awful beer.

Another interesting thing to look at is the standard deviation of the final judgements of the beers, which is a measurement of the extent to which we agreed about a particular brand of beer. Included in the full report, this number again shows good results for Bavaria, which had the lowest standard deviation value of only 0.49, which means that nobody was really negative about it. The highest standard deviation, interestingly, is for Hoegaarden, a Belgian white beer that ended up at 5th place: it had a standard deviation of 1.75, which is a pretty high figure. And indeed, opinions on this beer ranged from 4 (me) to 8 (Vera). Otherwise, it does seem that for some reason the more commonly known beers do have smaller standard deviation values, whereas people tend to differ more strongly in opinion on the more lower-priced beers.

Finally, as a price-minded Dutchman, I of course had to take a look at the relation between the price of the beers and their ratings. Calculating the correlation coefficient raised the surprising result that there seems to be no relation at all betwee the two factors, with the coefficient ending up as -0.06, actually indicating a very small negative correlation: the cheeper the beer, the beter, indeed!

To conclude things, the graph that just about says it all can be found here: it plots the quality of the beers against their prices (also showing the correlation line). From this graph, we can conclude that Bavaria is pretty obviously the best beer choice available, offering excellent quality at a good price. As a low-ender, Pitt should apparently be the beer of choice.

Overall, it has proved to be both an interesting and much enjoyable experience. It would be nice though to do the same test again and see whether one would actually get the same results. I can pretty well imagine that next time, after some more practicing, we will succeed in getting Hertog Jan on first place…

Last Modified : June 27th, 2004 Filed under : Miscellanea Navigate : Previous post / Next post