Taste Test Paper

Beer

The Blind Taste Test

Stephany Chang

William Chanaberry

Parisa Heydarifar

Yasin Matin

Quayshawn Nealy

Deandre Smelter

Jemea Thomas

Our group conducted a blind taste test to study consumers’ perceptions between different beers. The subject matter of beer was chosen for this experiment because the beverage is very common among college students. Also, individuals often differ on their perceptions of what beer is “good beer,” so we found this subject matter to be interesting. The group wanted to investigate this topic deeper to see if beer drinkers could really identify “higher quality and more expensive beer” as better tasting (on average). We decided to test out six different brands of beer to see if consumers could tell which brand of beer they were drinking in a blind setting and to understand the factors affecting their beer buying habits. The brands we chose to be involved in this experiment were Shock Top (The Original: Belgium White Wheat Ale), Blue Moon (The Original: Belgium Style White Wheat Ale), Dos Equis (Mexican Beer), Pabst Blue Ribbon (Light-Bodied Brew), Yuengling (The Original: The Traditional Lager), and Bud Light (Light-Bodied Brew) because they have high brand recognition with college students and are overall more inexpensive brands. For participants in the survey, we aimed for people who had more of an understanding of beer to increase the validity of our results. What we did, what we found, and the relevance of our data for marketing managers can provide deeper insights into the differences between brands or greater implications about a company’s products and be leveraged to develop successful marketing strategies.

The method was designed around a research process. The steps included identifying the problem, setting certain research objectives, designing a questionnaire, collecting data, analyzing and interpreting that data, and reporting on the research data collected. In identifying the problem, we first wanted to see what...