The Very Best: The Great Crappy Beer Taste Test

The Very Best: The Great Crappy Beer Taste Test

Article by Brendan Bonham
|
January 5, 2012
Tweet

“I’m gonna drink a lot of beer and stay out all night!” –Homer Simpson

That’s what college is all about, right? Sure, studying and getting good grades are important, but only because they’re the means towards you convincing your parents that they should pay for that oh-so-crucial seventh year of college. Therein lies the rub; if your parents are paying for everything, then what’s the point of having a job? And if you’re staying out all night, who has the time to make money, anyway? So if you’re gonna get drunk, then the booze better be cheap. If the booze is gonna be cheap, then it should suck as little as possible.

That’s where we come in.

Since The Black Sheep literally keeps tens of dollars in its budget for drinking experiments, the fine full-time staff decided to do all the legwork for you. On a cold, rainy Friday in Chicago we hunkered down in an apartment with a bunch of the scummiest beer we could find in an attempt to decipher which beer was least rancid. Thus, The Great Crappy Beer Taste Test was born.

It’s important to note that there’s a method to our beer-tasting madness, we don’t just go about this stuff willy-nilly:

The Method:

-Other than appearance, the whole taste test was conducted blindly; no participant knew which beer was which.

- The goal of The Great Crappy Beer Taste Test is not to discover which beer tastes best; the purpose is to discover which beer tastes least worse. It’s a subtle difference, people.

-We bought every crappy canned beer we could find at the Jewel, Walgreen’s and 7-Eleven by our office. Sadly, since our office is based in Chicago’s Wicker Park, none of the stores carried two staple crappy beers: Keystone Light and Natural Light. Not having those beers for the taste test is disappointing, but in all reality you, dear reader, are going to buy what you want, even if it comes in last.

-We tried to use as many controls during the test as possible. All the beers were kept at the same temperature. Three participants drank approximately 4 ounces of each beer from similar glasses. Each participant drank the same beer at the same time. The person running the test would fill each glass at the beginning of each tasting and rinse it out at the end of each tasting.

-During the tasting we asked that the participants rate the beers on a scale of 1-5 based on the following categories:

Street Credibility: If you rolled into a random house party with a case of this stuff, how embarrassed would you be to hand a can of it to an attractive member of the opposite sex?

When It Hits Your Lips: Initial flavor. When you take your first sip, does it make you wish you were licking a random hobo instead?

Bitter Beer Facability: Simply put, its aftertaste. Does it continue to go down smoothly? Or, conversely, if it tasted like a licked butt at first, does it suddenly taste like sweet ambrosia?

Please Make It Stop: A test of long-term drinkability. If you had two options-- drink this or drink nothing, how close would you be to choosing horrible, horrible sobriety?

The Damage: The average of the four categories.

Now, onto the results:

Truly Horrible Hops:

12) Icehouse (5% ABV)

Street Credibility: 1.8

When It Hits Your Lips: 1.2

Bitter Beer Facability: .5

Please Make It Stop: .75

The Damage: 1.1

Comments: Once Discount Liquor was trying to get rid of Icehouse 22oz bottles, so they were selling 24-packs for $8 each. I bought 5 24-packs, planning to sell bottles to my drunk friends for $1 each once the bars closed. The plan backfired when no one would buy them, and I had to drink all the Icehouse myself. That story sums up Icehouse’s (lack of) appeal.

11) Foster’s (5% ABV)

Street Credibility: 2

When It Hits Your Lips: 1.2

Bitter Beer Facability: 1.6

Please Make It Stop: 1

The Damage: 1.5

Comments: Foster’s: Australian for Crap. The only real appeal Foster’s has is the novelty-sized can. It’s good for a cheap joke and you can claim you’re drinking an import. Even then, the huge can has a drawback: you have to drink the whole thing. Foster’s sucks from start to finish and should be purchased by no one.

10) Corona Light (4.5% ABV)

Street Credibility: .9

When It Hits Your Lips: 3

Bitter Beer Facability: 1.4

Please Make It Stop: 1.1

The Damage: 1.6

Comments:“But you didn’t drink it with lime!” says a horde of idiots. Yes, this is true, but beer is like steak, it should be savored without adding anything. If we wanted our drinks to be fruitier, we’d switch to frozen margaritas.

9) Gameday Light (3.9% ABV)

Street Credibility: 4

When It Hits Your Lips: 2

Bitter Beer Facability: 1

Please Make It Stop: 0

The Damage: 1.81

Comments: Gameday is the 7-Eleven beer brand, which should say leagues about the flavor-- horrible to begin and even worse by the end. The can looks simple and cool, and if you refuse to admit it’s the 7-Eleven brand beer, your peers may laud you for your ability to try new things.

8) Pabst Blue Ribbon (5% ABV)

Street Credibility: 3.6

When It Hits Your Lips: 1.5

Bitter Beer Facability: 1

Please Make It Stop: 1.2

The Damage: 1.83

Comments: Hipsters of the world cry foul, but PBR really should stand for “Please, Butt Rape,” as that would be a pleasant alternative to actually having to drink this swill.

Makes You Say “Meh”:

7) Milwaukee’s Best Ice (5.9% ABV)

Street Credibility: 1

When It Hits Your Lips: 2.7

Bitter Beer Facability: 2.7

Please Make It Stop: 3

The Tally: 2.4

Comments: Milwaukee’s Best Ice has the highest ABV of any of the beers in this test, so it’ll certainly get you drunk on the cheap. While it doesn’t taste horrible, the can screams, “I’m gonna get bombed and throw up on your carpet; please kick me out of this party.”

6) Labatt Blue (5% ABV)

Street Credibility: 3.4

When It Hits Your Lips: 2.8

Bitter Beer Facability: 1.8

Please Make It Stop: 2.1

The Tally: 2.5

Comments: Average in every category, Labatt Blue accurately reflects Canada in its crappy beer ways.

The Cream of the Crap:

5) Miller Lite (4.2% ABV)

Street Credibility: 3.3

When It Hits Your Lips: 3.2

Bitter Beer Facability: 3

Please Make It Stop: 3

The Tally: 3.1

Comments: Like the rest of the beers in this tier, you know what you’re getting with Miller Lite. The beer may not taste great, but if enough of them get shoved down your gullet, that four quickly turns into a seven or an eight… and you haven’t been laid in a while anyway.

4) Bud Light (4.2% ABV)

Street Credibility: 3

When It Hits Your Lips: 3.3

Bitter Beer Facability: 3.5

Please Make It Stop: 3.3

The Tally: 3.2

Comments: Seeing Bud Light pull almost the exact same scores as its ‘tard sister, Busch Light, is equal parts enlightening and depressing. Equals in almost every way, Bud Light is here for the branding. So, keep a few in the fridge to impress your friends, but let the workhorse of the family do all the heavy lifting.

3) Busch Light (4.2% ABV)

Street Credibility: 2.3

When It Hits Your Lips: 3.9

Bitter Beer Facability: 3.5

Please Make It Stop: 3.3

The Tally: 3.3

Comments: The Honda Civic of the Anheuser-Busch family, you could shell out a few extra bucks for the BMW (Bud Light), but both products will do a fine job of helping you arrive at your final, alcohol-riddled destination. And hey, getting a 30-pack of this means you’ll have a few left over to stave off the hangover in the morning.

2) Old Style (4.7% ABV)

Street Credibility: 4.2

When It Hits Your Lips: 3.2

Bitter Beer Facability: 3.3

Please Make It Stop: 3.7

The Tally: 3.6

Comments: An old-school can to go with Old Style flavor, the surprise second-place beer should be honored and cherished like the national treasure it is. It’s cheap as dirt, and with a relatively high ABV to boot, Old Style is an acceptable alternative to the #1 spot…

The Most Mediocre:

1) Coors Light (4.15% ABV)

Street Credibility: 4.2

When It Hits Your Lips: 3.8

Bitter Beer Facability: 4.2

Please Make It Stop: 4.2

The Tally: 4.1

Comments: Cheap, drinkable in mass quantities, and with a can that doesn’t look retarded, Coors Light is just about everything you can ask for in a crappy beer. Beer snobs may look down on those who choose to drink Coors Light, but to them we say, “Fuck you, does your can change color?”

Our Thoughts:

- Going into the experiment, we were hoping to see the big-name brews like Bud Light, Miller Lite and Coors Light spread out a little more, as it would prove that a couple extra bucks doesn’t necessarily guarantee a (comparatively) high-quality beverage. Well, it didn’t work out that way. If you’re going to pay $5.50 for a 12-pack of Icehouse, you will get a beer that’s properly valued at less than 50 cents a can.

- Aside from a few outliers (Pleasantly: Old Style, unpleasantly: Gameday Light), the beers that ended up tasting most like ass had higher ABVs than the beers that did well in the challenge. To us, this states the obvious: beer companies hawking these products know that they can’t have it both ways; either their beer is going to be boozy and shitty, or light but less-than-horrible. Since the consumer isn’t willing to pony up the scratch for the best of both worlds, they’re not going to spend their time making a product that won’t sell.

- Though it makes sense logically, it’s nice to see some empirical evidence back up the notion that if a beer starts off tasting bad, it won’t get better. Like, ever. We’re looking at you, Gameday Light.

- It’s important to note appearance didn’t factor too heavily into the overall rankings. Busch Light received a relatively low Street Credibility score and placed in the top quarter, while Gameday Light was in the top quarter of Street Credibility scores and finished ninth overall.

- Fun fact: guess who correctly identified the most beers? The only girl, correctly identifying 4 out of the 12. The leftover case of Busch Light is for you, Jess.

With that, The Great Crappy Beer Taste Test draws to a close. Illusions were shattered, Livers were lost and the drunken orgy made everyone real awkward on Monday, but it was all in the name of science. If we’ve learned anything, it’s this: A world without beer is not a world we want to live in. Even if the beer totally sucks, like Icehouse.

EDIT: Upon some statistical, scientific data that got crunched for the sole purpose of this crappy beer taste test, we have some more information for you all to digest:

1. Do the different beers actually statistically differ according to taste?

Yes. According to the MANOVA results, there is a statistically significant difference among the taste scores and different beer choices, F( 33, 65.52) = 4.08, p <.0001. Follow-up univariate ANOVAs reveal that the beers differed across all three taste scores, including Hits Your Lips (F = 5.14, p <.0004), Bitterness (F = 9.47, p <.001), and Make it Stop (F = 11.16, p <.0001).

However, follow up post-hoc Tukey tests revealed that many of beers did not statistically differ from one another, suggesting that the beers should be grouped according into clusters based on their taste scores. For example, Coors Light, Busch Light, Old Style, Miller Lite, and Bud Light are not statistically different in taste scores in terms of Hits Your Lips, Bitterness, and Make it Stop. In a similar vein, there is no statistical difference between Icehouse, Foster’s, Corona Light, Gameday Light, and PBR across all three taste scores.

Follow up discriminant analysis showed that two discriminant functions are responsible for 94.74% of the total between beer group variance. The first function is a combination of the Make it Stop (standardized correlation = 1.31) and Bitterness (standardized correlation = .40). The second function is mostly made up of the Make it Stop score (standardized correlation = 2.82). What this suggests is that the most important factors that make it easiest to distinguish which beer you are tasting is the Make it Stop factor. Initial taste in beer, measured by Hits Your Lips, is less important. In other words, it is harder to tell the difference in beers based only on the initial taste of it.

Based on the above discriminant equation, we can correctly classify 55.66% of the beers based on their three taste ratings. This is much better than the 8.33% probability of chance alone.

2. Can we cluster the different beers into groups?

Based on the post-Hoc Tukey and discriminant tests, the scores suggest that we can better understand the differences in beer taste by classifying the beers into groups. Using the Two Step clustering procedure, the data suggests that the most difference between beers can be understood by dividing them into two groups. We can think of these groups as the “Most Shitty” and “Least Shitty” group.

The Most Shitty group contained the following beers:

- Icehouse, Foster’s, Corona Light, Gameday Light, PBR, and Labatt Blue

The Least Shitty group contained the other following beers:

- Coors Light, Old Style, Busch Light, Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Milwaukee’s Best Ice

Using discriminant analysis for these two groups, we can correctly predict whether or not a beer is Most Shitty or Least Shitty 94.5% of the time, much better than the 50% probability of chance alone.

Conclusions:

The results of the statistical analysis suggest two things. First, taste matters. That is, given the twelve beers in the sample, there is a significant difference in taste among them and the difference is evident according to the experiment. What seems to be the most important factor in distinguishing the beers is the taste lingering after consumption, measured in Make it Stop.

Second, it is hard to tell the difference between individual beers, but it is easy to tell the difference between really shitty beer, and not as shitty beer. The results suggest that we can classify the beer into these two groups. And that 9.5 times out of ten, you can tell the difference these two groups.