I'm a Coors man
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As a craft brewer myself, statements like that hurt deep in my soul. Of course mass-produced swill all tastes the same, it all uses the same craftsmanship (not much) and ingredients. It's all the same type of beer (some goofy ass mixture of grains including rice and/or corn, mild hops, and lager yeast brewed at standard lager temperatures).
The comparison to Guinness is ridiculous as well. It's as if they gave people 4 shots of vodka and one of tequila and said "look, all liquor other than tequila tastes the same!"
Throw some real lagers in there and I bet they'd stand out even with the labels removed. Not as far as a stout obviously, but nobody could mistake a Boston Lager for a Budweiser.
I do however agree that all beer is not even close to equal I'm not big on alcohol but I do enjoy good beer and this is something that I can distinguish easily from the cheap beer.
Granted, I've spent my entire life on the western side of the Rockies, and I can imagine places where you can't get anything but lagers and Guinness. I just can't imagine never seeing even Sam Adams on tap.
Blackfoot also does a lot of one-off batches that only last a week or two. They like to experiment.
It's a blog dedicated to Montana microbreweries.
Tequila or vodka (not together, separate) would be very interesting studies, too. I'm not convinced that anyone but connoisseurs would rate blind vodka taste tests consistent with their preferred brand.
The bottom shelf to mid shelf price increment is pretty damn obvious in taste. The cheap stuff is bad. Once you're paying over ~$35 per liter I doubt anyone can tell anything apart.
I was at a proper British beer festival the other day with 21 Ales and 18 lagers, I'd challenge the writer to run the same test with them :) There was everything from thick "gravy" to a really nice, light, fruity lager.
(also, when I see people doing blind tests like this I always have this urge to swap out one of the samples with a bottle of Mexican chilli beer [beer which has had a chilli shoved in the bottle]. That would be a "taste sensation")
Around here we have shed loads of micro-breweries.
Here's the list of breweries:
http://www.greatamericanbeerfestival.com/breweries-exhibitor...
It's a really great event for anyone who loves Beer:)
Budweiser is a real lager. It's a pretty faithful czech style pilsner.
Bottom fermenting. Many grains are used in lager. Some even have maize in them.
Limiting yourself to barley, wheat, and hops like modern German law does is too much prescription and not enough description.
Guinness also spends boatloads on advertising (here in Ireland they're not that unique as we've got several choices of stout for sale, the main ones being Murphys and Beamish apart from Guinness). I'm sure Guinness also advertise heavily in the US and other markets. So it's incorrect to present this as two choices. Two major advertising campaigns Guinness used in recent months include "Arthur's Day" celebrations and the Guinness ads throughout the decades. The former seems a bit of a gimmick to me, but the latter was interesting IMO as a way of showing how advertising changed over the years.
Indeed they do, but I'd say it's advertisement to make themselves known at all, not to differentiate themselves. Outside the british isles, there are few Guiness-like beers outside of Guiness itself (or more precisely the others are pretty much unknown to the vast majority of the populations).
> or more precisely the others are pretty much unknown to the vast majority of the populations
I guess that's the whole "build it and they won't come" argument. It requires good marketing to convince people to try a Guinness or buy an iPad or whatever (although the iPad is probably a bad example as it's not unique, Microsoft had the courier in 2003).
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=guinness+commerc...
Guinness does plenty of advertising.
The fact that Guinness stood out was just there to show that without a brand you need to be significantly different (in this case, different tasting) in order to stand out.
In other words, you would probably guess that you're drinking a Guinness if you happen to see its color. I think that's a significant confounder here.
We had people place five cars on a perceptual map. The five vehicles consisted of four medium sedans and one pickup truck. When branding badges were removed, we found that people tended to lump the four sedans together on a perceptual map, while placing the pickup truck off by itself.
Conventional American lagers are ONE type of beer in am ocean, The range from stouts to wheat beers is astounding. This is as if I compared only cars from China, and threw in one Chevy to analyze the car market.
He ignores the fast-growing premium stuff, e.g. Sam Adams. Every town has its own version; here in Tampa, it's Ybor Gold. Of course they don't, individually, sell as much as Budweiser; by definition, a local brew is only local.
Yes, better beer is more expensive. That cheaper beer sells more is hardly news. But to think he's found any information in a test that is designed to produce the result he got is nonsense. Of course, five cheap, American lagers taste about the same, and of course, it's obvious that an Irish stout tastes different.
I have a Welsh, beer-loving GF; the author could at least try Wikipedia.
For example, the beer study would get much more interesting if one could assess the results by segment - say "beer expert", "college student", "joe blue collar", etc. The outcomes can really inform positioning and message...and can lead to product extensions based purely around marketing. Diet Coke (for women) and Coke Zero (for me) are a great example.
*Yes - I have an MBA from UNC Chapel Hill. Please flame as necessary. :)
ftfy
First the article takes the idea of beer drinkers appreciating different flavours at face value and then rebuts it. Drinkers are claiming to be appreciating the various different flavours, but actually they taste they same. That surprises me. I think it would be easier to spin a taste-bud romance around alcohol if the flavours were more various.
Second the article suggests that advertising is "creating" the different tastes and tries to draw a wider lesson for other products that one might advertise. I disagree with drawing any wider lesson. Alcohol is a unusual product such that the purpose of advertisements is especially covert. The advertisers are not fooling the drinkers into tasting differences that are not there. There are colluding with users in providing a shiny social sheen on a product that would otherwise offer only a guilty pleasure.
Also, "alcohol is a toxic industrial solvent." So is water.
The mind works in interesting ways.