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Does anyone know of any double-blind taste-tests for enthusiast setups like this? Not limited to coffee but I'd also be very curious about tea, wine and much of

Does anyone know of any double-blind taste-tests for enthusiast setups like this? Not limited to coffee but I'd also be very curious about tea, wine and much of the accepted wisdom of both classic and modern cooking. I don't mean this to be snide. I'm totally open to this kind of setup producing a far superior cup of coffee. But if we accept the premise that at least a portion of the experience, however slight, is psychological, I'd be very interested to know how big that portion is. Somewhere on my depressingly long list of project ideas is a kickstarter for a video series that does exactly this - very rigorous double-blind tests for coffee, tea, wine, beer, food preparation techniques etc.

holograham 13y ago
I would be more than willing to test my mettle :) Of course the issue with taste is that there is a huge mental component. Sure your taste buds/olfactory receptors tell your brain what you are experiencing but your eyes, touch, mental state, etc play a significant role as well. I am sure part of the reason I enjoy my cup of joe so much is because I hand craft it which gives me a sense of satisfaction -> hence positive mood. Also the fact I drink it in bed while reading activates more positive vibes which re-enforce the feedback loop that says "this coffee is AMAZING".
dljsjr 13y ago
I'm not aware of any super rigorous studies, but anecdotally the different types of setups definitely produce different flavors (I'm hesitant to ascribe a qualitative word like "better" since it could be pretty subjective). My room-mates were mostly apathetic to coffee before I moved in with them, but I have Chemex, an Aeropress, and a Moka. Now that they're used to my coffee, they can readily tell which one of the three I've used to make coffee when I make it. They also get excited when I decide to make coffee for the house after an extended dry spell; they use a Keurig when I don't make coffee and they both subjectively think that the stuff I make is way better than their Keurig. I can't ascribe all of that to just the setup, a part of it is the quality of the beans (sometimes I roast my own after buying green beans from Sweet Marias, and I also have a running Tonx subscription). But I'd say from experience that the brew method does in fact make a huge difference (still won't ascribe a qualitative word to it, though).
oskarth 13y ago
The problem is that the premise is flawed, in that sense that it's the wrong setting for enjoying things like for example wine. A big part of enjoying things like wine, coffee, tea, beer, whiskey, chocolate etc is in the setup, experience and anticipation of it. Good company and a nice mood makes wine taste better. By blind-testing it that dimension is lost. It doesn't produce a more "pure" or "objective" result, because the metric is wrong - the setup is artificial to begin with. That being said, there's nothing wrong with just enjoying a cup of coffee and that being it. Coffee snobs and the likes who insists on their metric being the only right ones are annoying (not implying that the author is of that variety).
- gabemart 13y ago
  > By blind-testing it that dimension is lost. It doesn't produce any more "pure" result, because the setup is artificial to begin with. I agree that the results of a properly controlled blind tasting are not more "valid" than the results of enjoying a coffee in a casual setting. However, they are helpful in indicating how much of that casual experience of a coffee is due to the contextual and psychological elements of the experience and how much is a result of the intrinsic qualities of the cup of coffee itself. I think this is interesting in its own terms. I don't think the premise is flawed, because the premise is not "a double-blind taste test will establish whether subjective taste is true or false", but rather "a double-blind taste test will indicate to what degree subjective taste is determined strictly by the substance being tasted".
- stdbrouw 13y ago
  Surely when you're trying to figure out whether one cup of coffee is better than another, you're not interested in an absolute number as much as a comparative ranking? Why would taking away the "setup, experience and anticipation" also take away our capacity for taste and evaluation?
aaronem 13y ago
Well, you can do an A/B/X comparison; Coffeebar2000 makes doing so quite simple. But don't expect your results to sway anyone who's already strongly committed to one side or the other of the debate; if you can't tell the difference, the enthusiasts will just stick with their lossless methods and claim you don't have a proper sense of taste or your mug's not up to standard or something, and if you can, the "lossy is good enough" crowd will call you an elitist idiot who's only pretending in order to justify having spent ridiculous amounts of money on equipment which can't possibly make a difference to what you're tasting.
darkstar999 13y ago
Depends on what you are comparing. Usually these enthusiast setups have fresh beans ground just before the brew. You can most definitely taste the difference between that and, say, a keurig cup.
sokoloff 13y ago
Slightly different than what you propose, but my wife (PhD biologist who ran her own lab for many years) was annoyed at my insistence that I could tell the difference in red wine "processed" through the Vinturi aeration device. She ran multiple A-B-X tests over a several month period as we tried a bunch of new wines in our house. I recall that I was perfect 11-for-11 in determining whether X was A or B, and was 10-for-11 in which of A or B had gone through the Vinturi. (In all cases, A, B, and X were the same wine; A XOR B had been run through the Vinturi; X was the same as A XOR B at her discretion. I don't know what protocol she used to randomize the trials. Each (opaque) glass was labelled with a sticker on the bottom. I didn't know ahead of time which of the three glasses were A, B or X. I'm sure it doesn't meet peer-review standards, but she was trying hard to prove that I was full of crap and failed in this instance. :) )

holograham 13y ago

I would be more than willing to test my mettle :) Of course the issue with taste is that there is a huge mental component. Sure your taste buds/olfactory receptors tell your brain what you are experiencing but your eyes, touch, mental state, etc play a significant role as well. I am sure part of the reason I enjoy my cup of joe so much is because I hand craft it which gives me a sense of satisfaction -> hence positive mood. Also the fact I drink it in bed while reading activates more positive vibes which re-enforce the feedback loop that says "this coffee is AMAZING".

dljsjr 13y ago

I'm not aware of any super rigorous studies, but anecdotally the different types of setups definitely produce different flavors (I'm hesitant to ascribe a qualitative word like "better" since it could be pretty subjective). My room-mates were mostly apathetic to coffee before I moved in with them, but I have Chemex, an Aeropress, and a Moka. Now that they're used to my coffee, they can readily tell which one of the three I've used to make coffee when I make it. They also get excited when I decide to make coffee for the house after an extended dry spell; they use a Keurig when I don't make coffee and they both subjectively think that the stuff I make is way better than their Keurig. I can't ascribe all of that to just the setup, a part of it is the quality of the beans (sometimes I roast my own after buying green beans from Sweet Marias, and I also have a running Tonx subscription). But I'd say from experience that the brew method does in fact make a huge difference (still won't ascribe a qualitative word to it, though).

oskarth 13y ago

The problem is that the premise is flawed, in that sense that it's the wrong setting for enjoying things like for example wine. A big part of enjoying things like wine, coffee, tea, beer, whiskey, chocolate etc is in the setup, experience and anticipation of it. Good company and a nice mood makes wine taste better. By blind-testing it that dimension is lost. It doesn't produce a more "pure" or "objective" result, because the metric is wrong - the setup is artificial to begin with. That being said, there's nothing wrong with just enjoying a cup of coffee and that being it. Coffee snobs and the likes who insists on their metric being the only right ones are annoying (not implying that the author is of that variety).

gabemart 13y ago
> By blind-testing it that dimension is lost. It doesn't produce any more "pure" result, because the setup is artificial to begin with. I agree that the results of a properly controlled blind tasting are not more "valid" than the results of enjoying a coffee in a casual setting. However, they are helpful in indicating how much of that casual experience of a coffee is due to the contextual and psychological elements of the experience and how much is a result of the intrinsic qualities of the cup of coffee itself. I think this is interesting in its own terms. I don't think the premise is flawed, because the premise is not "a double-blind taste test will establish whether subjective taste is true or false", but rather "a double-blind taste test will indicate to what degree subjective taste is determined strictly by the substance being tasted".
stdbrouw 13y ago
Surely when you're trying to figure out whether one cup of coffee is better than another, you're not interested in an absolute number as much as a comparative ranking? Why would taking away the "setup, experience and anticipation" also take away our capacity for taste and evaluation?

aaronem 13y ago

Well, you can do an A/B/X comparison; Coffeebar2000 makes doing so quite simple. But don't expect your results to sway anyone who's already strongly committed to one side or the other of the debate; if you can't tell the difference, the enthusiasts will just stick with their lossless methods and claim you don't have a proper sense of taste or your mug's not up to standard or something, and if you can, the "lossy is good enough" crowd will call you an elitist idiot who's only pretending in order to justify having spent ridiculous amounts of money on equipment which can't possibly make a difference to what you're tasting.

darkstar999 13y ago

Depends on what you are comparing. Usually these enthusiast setups have fresh beans ground just before the brew. You can most definitely taste the difference between that and, say, a keurig cup.

sokoloff 13y ago

Slightly different than what you propose, but my wife (PhD biologist who ran her own lab for many years) was annoyed at my insistence that I could tell the difference in red wine "processed" through the Vinturi aeration device. She ran multiple A-B-X tests over a several month period as we tried a bunch of new wines in our house. I recall that I was perfect 11-for-11 in determining whether X was A or B, and was 10-for-11 in which of A or B had gone through the Vinturi. (In all cases, A, B, and X were the same wine; A XOR B had been run through the Vinturi; X was the same as A XOR B at her discretion. I don't know what protocol she used to randomize the trials. Each (opaque) glass was labelled with a sticker on the bottom. I didn't know ahead of time which of the three glasses were A, B or X. I'm sure it doesn't meet peer-review standards, but she was trying hard to prove that I was full of crap and failed in this instance. :) )