 What isn't true of Sam Adams?
More Booze You Can Use When we last heard from them, the members of the Slate beer-testing team were coping with lagers and trying to see if they could taste the 3-to-1 price difference between the most- and least-expensive brands. The answer was: They found one beer they really liked, Samuel Adams Boston Lager , and one they really hated, imported Grolsch from Holland. Both were expensive beers--Grolsch was the most expensive in the test--and otherwise the testers had a hard time telling beers apart. The members of the team, as noted in the original article, all hold day jobs at Microsoft, mainly as designers, managers, and coders for Microsoft Word. The point of the second test was not to find the difference between cheap and expensive beers but instead to compare a variety of top-of-the-line beers. Could they detect any of the subtleties of brewing style and provenance that microbrew customers pay such attention to when choosing some Doppelbock over a cream ale? Since the tasting panel had left the first round grumbling that cheap lagers were not a fair test of their abilities, this second round of testing was advertised to the panel as a reward. A "craft beer." These were the kinds of beer the panel members said they liked--and the ones they said they were most familiar with. One aspect of the reward was that they would presumably enjoy the actual testing more--fewer rueful beer descriptions along the lines of "urine" or "get it away!" were expected than in the first round. The other aspect of anticipated reward was the panelists' unspoken but obvious assumption that this time they would "do better" on the test. Intellectual vanity being what it is, people who had fought for and won jobs at Microsoft and who still must fight every six months for primacy on the employee-ranking scale (which determines--gasp!--how many new stock options they receive) would assume that their skill as tasters was on trial, just as much as the beer was. Here is what happened and what it meant: 1. Procedure. This was similar in most ways to the experimental approach of Round 1. The nine testers who showed up were a subset of the original 12. The missing three dropped out with excuses of "my wife is sick" (one person) and "meeting is running long" (two). As before, each tester found before him on a table 10 red plastic cups, labeled A through J.
 it was still considered one of the Bests
 it is a lager the testers liked  it scored the highest on the previous test  people scored it differently on the second test  it was still considered one of the Bests