 What isn't true of Sam Adams?
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? 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. The missing three dropped out with excuses of "my wife is sick" (one person) and "meeting is running long" (two). The A-to-J labeling scheme was the same for all testers. Descriptions of and comments about each beer's taste--"smooth and nutty," "too strong," etc.
 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