Sucking the Fun Out, With Science!

THE PROCESS:
I poured the beers behind a screen in the kitchen, so the tasters wouldn't know what they were drinking, and brought them out in small plastic cups carried on a cardboard tray. Certainly, this was not the perfect tasting environment envisioned by the brewers, but drinking with friends out of plastic cups is probably a more realistic "real world situation" that in some... uh... pumpkin patch?

Getting through 12 pumpkin beers meant I needed to keep portions small enough to avoid drunkeness impacting the ratings for the final beers while also minimizing time between beers so that people didn't get too ancy/bored having only a sip here and there to take them through their Saturday night.

I would swoop into the room with a tray of tiny cups, pass them out then head back to the kitchen to prepare the next batch while the rest of the folks rated the beers using a sheet of paper I printed them.

I used the same rating system from the year before, though the results varied a lot both from beer to beer and year to year. Still, the results pointed towards some significant trends for each beer that could possibly maybe indicate some sort of valid results from which conclusions can and will be drawn.

Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Process and Procedures
Part 3: Tasting Parameters
Part 4: Results
Part 5: Conclusions


Copyright 2007 homeworkparty.com