When it comes to beer, we’re very aware of our pre-existing biases. Or, at least, we try to be. It’s all-too-common for people who are fans of beer to make up their minds about a beer before they even taste it. How many times have you seen someone turn their nose up at an otherwise acceptable beer because it turned out to be made by one of the big brewers rather than the craft they thought it was? It’s not limited to us beer snobs, either. Blind taste tests have shown that there really isn’t all that much difference among the most popular beers in the U.S., but drinkers of that king of beer are some of the most brand-loyal consumers anywhere.

Supposedly we can’t help it. Detailed in the book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions is an experiment done at MIT (well, one of the nearby pubs) that consisted of taste tests between Budweiser and “MIT Brew”, which was actually Budweiser with a couple of drops of balsamic vinegar. When not told about the vinegar ahead of time, the MIT Brew was most popular. When told ahead of time, though, the beer with the vinegar was invariably found to be undesirable. There were other implications as well, such as the people who found out about the special ingredient afterward were generally willing to adulterate their beer in the future.

Now, of course, one of my first thoughts when I read this was: Well no wonder…anything would improve Budweiser. But doesn’t that kind of prove the point? If the beer had been, say, Flying Dog Snake Dog IPA, would I have been as credulous? A couple of years ago Ron did a blind Octoberfest beer tasting with me and the rest of the Hop Talk Advisory Panel. He snuck a Budweiser American Ale into the mix (it was newly released at that time) and the cognitive dissonance caused when I found out had me doing all kinds of mental calisthenics to convince myself that I liked it less than I originally thought. (“The charcoal smoke was messing up my sense of smell.” “My tastebuds had become desensitized by all the other beer I’d had by then.” etc.)

As pointed out in the Lifehacker article, we have to do this. We have to take the shortcut of being biased from prior experience because our brains can’t process 100% of the input our senses provide. Otherwise we’d never make sense of the world. This is no less true when drinking beer. We should just be aware of it, I think.

I look forward to delving deeper into this book. With a good beer, natch.

(via Lifehacker)