The beers were different, but that doesn't mean that we can match the beer to the brand name.
I wish we had gotten people to rate the beers out of 10, or something, as well as asking them to guess the brand. That way we would have a different set of figures relating to opinions of quality. I suspect that we would have had a pretty clear ranking of beers, regardless of what brand people thought they were.
There is a lot of guesswork involved in this because, as much as we might wish it were not the case, our drink choices are affected by factors other than taste. We have notions of which brands should be what and then persuade ourselves that we see those qualities in the beer we have ordered, or write off any shortfall in expectations to the proverbial bad pint.
When I was presented with these beers, I chose the beer I liked most and equated that with the brand of beer I thought I liked most and so on.
With one beer brand guessed correctly it might seem that I didn't have a clue what I was doing, but I think what actually happened was that I had some of my prejudices exposed.
My experience of the second round tasting (microgirl and I) was as follows:
A: Pretty bog standard nitro stout with no real character. Unimpressed.
B: Nice aroma struggling through the nitro head. Very nice depth of flavour coming from an obviously well designed grist. An enjoyable beer that must be even better without the nitrogen. I name thee O'Hara's.
C: Pretty bog standard nitro stout with no real character. Unimpressed.
D: Nice espresso coffee aroma even through the nitro head. A depth of flavour that, while it does not compete with B, leaves me thinking: “Yeknow; if I was stuck somewhere with nothing else, I might actually enjoy a pint of this.”
As I had already decided that B was O'Hara's I was left with two lousy beers and a decent one. I decided that the decent one was Beamish, as that was my favourite of the big three, when I still drank nitro stout. A and C were a complete guess as, while they did taste different from each other, they were equally shitty, so I randomly assigned them as A: Murphy's and C: Guinness.
In the end it turned out that I spotted O'Hara's correctly, but the rest were not what I thought.
D, the only one outside of O'Hara's that I found palatable, turned out to be Murphy's. That left the two lousy beers as Guinness and Beamish. For that revelation alone the night was worth it. Beamish is banished to the category of lousy pint, from now on and Murphy's has taken it's place as the only one of the big three I will even consider drinking on nitro tap.
