Between Brulosophy and Experimental Brewing, there is a lot of tasting experiments going on! As I listened to the most recent EB podcast today I thought…what the hell is really the point of the experiments? :o
While I think these are all very interesting, I think the consensus (so far) has been that there is no consensus! I would be willing to wager that the same response would happen to people if we gave them the same commercial beers or the same brownie recipe, the same etc. etc.
I think it’s way more physiological than anything else. It would be nice to have some consensus on some brewing practices, recipes, etc. but I think either it doesn’t exist or we are a long way away from attaining it. In the meantime, I’ll aimlessly follow the results!
Well, in the case of the whirlpool temp experiment, there was consensus that it made a difference. But there were obviously 2 schools of thought on what the difference was! That’s why we discussed the subjectivity of tasting and the influences on it. It’s not something you can actually quantify. So, in the end, we’re just trying to provide info that can help you make better/more interesting beer. How you apply that info is up to you.
I can think of a few reasons why the results aren’t as black and white as we’d (ideally) like to see:
A) You have multiple tasters all giving their own responses to the experiment. That’s like trying to weigh a series of items using a different scale each time. You will likely see a trend appear over time, but since none are calibrated to each other you won’t hit an ideal level of precision across the board. A bowling ball will read fine on a bathroom scale or a fruit scale, but will max out a gram scale. An aspirin would be fine on the gram scale, but not the larger ones.
B) Each experiment tries to hold as many variables the same, and tests a specific variable. So the results from that experiment are only applicable within those specific variables. The whirlpool temp experiment may give different results in a blond ale vs a stout vs an IPA. Maybe different varieties of hops give different results. Maybe different yeast strains would have an effect, or base malt, or fermentation profile, etc. Basically, you have to view each experiment as a starting point, or a few data points, and then add that in to your own experience to decide how it is going to impact your brewing.
C) By nature, these experiments have a relatively small sample size. As you add more and more data, trends start to become clearer. Denny and Drew have taken an approach to get more data points, but at the expense of less control over the testing because of the crowdsourcing aspect. We’ve already seen some potential issues in the first two experiments. I applaud them for taking the right approach and calling suspect data into question, and analyzing the numbers both with and without the outliers.
I was fortunate enough to have done a test of the 120F whirlpool before the most recent XB podcast was posted. I feel that I have gotten some good results from this, and the recent IGOR experiment gave me some confidence that there is at least something to this technique. That makes me want to explore it further to see how I want to apply it to my own brewing. That’s all I could want and more out of an experiment like this.
A single experiment with a small sample size is not going to produce a conclusive answer to anything. These experiments should really be thought of as trying to open up accepting dogma and encouraging people to think about how they brew and why they brew that way.
It’s disappointing to see people tout the conclusions of a single experiment as conclusive, universal facts that have settled all questions about a particular issue but I am seeing that with increasing frequency across the internets.
i Just commented on this topic in another thread. like anything, there are facts and then there are individual perceptions that don’t necessarily equate to facts. Objectively looking at something that is highly subjective is difficult to do sometimes, and declaring it a fact should be done with caution IMO.
Yeah, I think a lot of people look to things “scientifical” in nature for their certainties and to reinforce what they already believe is true. Plus a lot of lay people have been trained to react this way by breathless media reports about the current likelihood that eggs will kill you.
One of the things I like about what we’re doing is we’ve built into the setup the notion of a repeated trial. It’s imperfect, what with the lack of precision inherent to homebrewers, but the results are only part of the reason to do these things. The discussion is the fun part and the thinking scientifically is good for the brain.
Plus, we do try to encourage people to take the results with a notion towards figuring out if they agree and if they see the same thing.
I went on the Igor site and added my experiment idea regarding aroma hopping. I’m curious to see what a relatively large group of beer fans would prefer. A hazy dry hopped APA/IPA or a brilliant one with perhaps slightly less aroma. It would be a two beer, side by side, with the question being “which do you prefer?”
The two beers would be identical but for aroma hopping. One would get X amount of dry hops at FG for 4 days, then no fining. The other would get that X amount of hops at a 120F whirlpool for 15 min, then at FG it gets crashed and gell fined.
How about comparing pitch rates? You could compare results of pitching 5g dry yeast to 10g (or something similar). I suggest dry yeast because you can weigh it to quantity the pitch rate.