 What was the difference between the first and second test?
Both were expensive beers--Grolsch was the most expensive in the test--and otherwise the testers had a hard time telling beers apart. 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. 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. 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. 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. The A-to-J labeling scheme was the same for all testers. If the first ranking was a measure of how good each beer was, this was an attempt to explain what made it good.
 Beer type and expense
 Beer type and expense  Beer type only  The types of beer in both stages of the test were the same, but the presentation method differed significantly  Expense only