Samuel Adams has been releasing a Latitude 48 IPA beer for some time now. It's a pretty decent IPA . But more interestingly, they've just released a special "48 Latitude deconstructed" series that is a 12-pack that has two bottles of their regular Latitude 48 beer, and then two bottles each of the Latitude 48 beer made from one of the five single hops that make up the regular beer: Hallertau Mittelfrueh from Germany; East Kent Goldings from England; and Ahtanum, Simcoe, and Zeus, all from Washington state's Yakima Valley (The beer's name refers to the 48th latitude line, where all these hops are grown). This provides us with a unique opportunity to taste what each of the hops does for a beer, within the well-controlled context of the rest of the beer being exactly the same. The series lends itself to a natural experiment in the perceptual confuseability of the different hops. Using multidimensional scaling, we can also create a geometric representation of the similarities between the beer. We've run ourselves in the following taste perception experiment/challenge, and we'd like your data too. Here was our method:

Method: Individuals were allowed to freely sample each beer to build an idea of the flavor (and smell) of each type of hops. Finally, we poured each beer type into a uniquely-identified cup. Tasters were to take a small sample from each and attempt to identify the hops, thus creating a confusion matrix. Many tasters resampled from known beers after tasting each unknown beer, in order to better identify the mystery hops.

So, here are the steps for running the experiment:

1. Assemble a group of friends.
2. Allow your friends to sample the six beers. Your friends should know, at this stage, the specific beer that they are tasting. Your friends should sample each of the 6 beers (including the blend), as often as they like to. Science requires multiple replications. After this stage, your friends should feel like they have unique taste impressions associated with the names of the hops.
3. Arrange a set of mystery cups with each of the six beers. It'll help your record keeping if you label them A, B, C, D, E, and F, and then keep an undisclosed sheet that says what each of these letters really means (e.g. A = Simcoe, B = Zeus, etc.)
4. Have your friends sample the mystery cups and then try to write down the real hops name for each.
5. For each friend, send us all six of their responses on the form below.

After submittting your responses, click here to see a preliminary analysis of the results of tasters who have preceded you.

Date last modified: 7/31/2011