 How good were test subjects at labeling the beers in round two?
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. 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. 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. Every beer in Round 2 would be a fancy beer. 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. 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. Each cup held 3 ounces of one of the beers. The A-to-J labeling scheme was the same for all testers. After sampling all beers, the tasters rated them as follows: Overall quality points, from zero to 100, reflecting their personal, subjective fondness for the beer. Descriptions of and comments about each beer's taste--"smooth and nutty," "too strong," etc. If the first ranking was a measure of how good each beer was, this was an attempt to explain what made it good. Best and Worst , one of each from the group. They were asked to put each beer in its proper category--and to name a specific brewery and brand if they could. The idea here was to test the veteran beer drinkers' claim to recognize the distinctive tastes of famous brands.
 Few of them got anything correct
 Few of them got anything correct  None of them could guess any of them  Most of them got most things correct  Most of them got them perfect