Put your cheap beer in expensive bottles
This was a weird beer. My wife hated it, but I kind of liked it, and not just for the pun, although as we'll see, the word "faith" is telling.
For our latest Lips of Faith collaboration, we teamed up with friends Hof Ten Dormaal from the small village of Tildonk, Belgium. Like New Belgium, Hof Ten Dormaal blurs the line between tradition and innovation: The charming family-owned farm and brewery produces everything from classic Belgian blonds to sours fermented by ambient flora to forward-thinking hoppy saisons. In that spirit, we’ve joined forces to craft a deliciously uncommon springtime golden ale, which blends Old World ingredients with modern flavors. Spelt, malted sunflower seeds, and wild carrot herbs swell for a nutty, bready, grassy wash, while Saaz and Mosaic hops lend spicy, tropical accents to the sip. Kick off your winter boots and welcome in the fresh flavors of spring.
If you're a total beer nerd, you can watch a "making of" video at New Belgium's website, including an interview with an "R&D brewer," which I did not know was a thing.
I am not a total beer nerd. I like beer, and yes, this beer tastes different and spicy due to the unusual ingredients, but I do not understand the flowery language above. In fact, I think it's mostly bullshit. I get a little bit of banana sometimes when I drink this one, but maybe that's subjective (I hate bananas, by the way).
The science is further advanced in wine tasting than in beer tasting. Mostly it shows that humans suck at it, varying between +/-4 points for the same wine from the same bottle, and +/-10 points for the same bottle, on a 100-point scale.
"I think there are individual expert tasters with exceptional abilities sitting alone who have a good sense, but when you sit 100 wines in front of them the task is beyond human ability," he says. "We have won our fair share of gold medals but now I have to say we were lucky."
Not only that, in a different article, wine majors couldn't tell the difference between a red wine and a white wine dyed red.
"The tasters in the first experiment, the one with the dyed wine, described the sorts of berries and grapes and tannins they could detect in the red wine just as if it really was red. Every single one, all 54, could not tell it was white."
Maybe dogs would be better at it. They're better with smells than primates are.
The science also shows that we are extremely prone to bias based on pre-conceptions in other ways, such as the price of the bottle. And the effect extends to other categories of food.
Another experiment at Cal-Tech pitted five bottles of wine against each other. They ranged in price from $5 to $90. Similarly, the experimenters put cheap wine in the expensive bottles -- but this time they put the tasters in a brain scanner. While tasting the wine, the same parts of the brain would light up in the machine every time, but with the wine the tasters thought was expensive, one particular region of the brain became more active. Another study had tasters rate cheese eaten with two different wines. One they were told was from California, the other from North Dakota. The same wine was in both bottles. The tasters rated the cheese they ate with the California wine as being better quality, and they ate more of it.
So it's not just the verbal bullshit parts of the brain that are susceptible. Our actual perceptions of reality are up for discussion. It would be interesting to see how the subjects in these experiments would do outside of a judging situation, in isolation from other judges and the pressures of the contest. This post from yesterday suggests they would be more objective.
I still hate cheap beer.