Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Root beer challenge

This summer, one of the fun things Noah wanted to do was figure out which was the best bottled root beer (there may have been adult guidance to narrow the experiment in scope to bottled only). We went to 2 stores and bought one case of each kind of bottled root beer that we could find.  Here's the line-up:
We tried Dang!, Spring Grove, Killebrew, Henry Wienhard's, Stewart's, Virgil's, IBC, and Sprecher.  We opened one bottle of each and poured a taste into little labeled cup (the labels were on the bottom where the consumer couldn't see). It didn't feel like it would be too much to drink in one sitting when we planned this, but by the end we were all feeling a little OD on root beer.
We each had an area where we could line them up as we tasted and we sorted them into best to worst ranking.
Then, we compared our rankings and created the family master list.  I kept the groupings, but not the specific scores since they didn't really matter in the end.
The varieties of locally available bottled root beer that we'll continue to buy occasionally are: Sprecher, Dang!, and Henry Wienhard's. 
The varieties of root beer that we'll choose not to drink, even if we happen to be in a social situation where they are available are: Spring Grove and Virgil's. We had general agreement that they had a medicinal undertone to the taste and we don't care for them.
The other 3 were okay, fine, nothing to splurge on, but not to reject if we happen upon it in a social situation. Generally, I think they had more fizz and foam than the leading names. 
It was an interesting anomaly in that Noah and Brian had identical top 3 lists - which isn't just a case of son wanting to be like father, because they didn't know what was in each cup until we revealed each ranking. What is the probability of that?

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