Cider Tasting 2021

Cider Tasting 2021 was a party I threw on 2021-07-18 which involved a double-blind tasting of 15 different hard ciders. I got a lot of compliments on the party being unique and fun, and I plan to do similar double-blind parties in the future.

Results

Here are the results (15 being the worst, 1 being the best) of the different ciders:

Rank	Cider	Rating
15	Rightful Cider	14
14	Ace Blackjack 21	15
13	Virtue Rosé	17
12	Virtue Brut	19
11	Virtue Lapinette	23
10	Blake's Triple Jam	31
9	Resort Pike MK's Ultra	36
8	Stella Artois	42
7	Rekorderlig Wild Berries	45
6	Starcut Pulsar	46
5	Northern Oak O.G.	55
4	Northern Oak Blu Berry	56
3	Ciderboys Tropical Wave	57
2	Rekorderlig Pear	73
1	Strongbow Gold	86

To understand the rating column, read the Rating Process section below.

Impetus

Ciders are my alcoholic drink of choice, but, unfortunately, they're not very popular in the USA, so most bars only sell Angry Orchard, which is disappointing because I've typically viewed Angry Orchard as an inferior cider. However, I've always been curious if my displeasure with Angry Orchard was because it's just so ubiquitous, or because it really doesn't taste very good. For a couple years, I wanted to do a double-blind cider tasting, but I didn't want to have to buy a couple hundred dollars of cider. I was intending to do the party in the summer of 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic required me to hold off until 2021. To spread out the cost, I had each friend who was coming bring a different hard cider (I had a master list online that everyone could see to prevent duplicates). Ironically, nobody bought Angry Orchard, so that just gives me a reason to do it again in 2022!

Double Blind Process

In order to eliminate personal bias, I chose to use a double-blind taste test. This ensured that nobody present at the party, not even me, knew which flavors they were drinking. Ciders were poured into 15 identical mason jars, and two sheets of data were kept. If a person has both lists, they can tell which cider is in which jar, but, individually, there isn't enough information. The person who poured the cider into the jars made the first list, the person who randomized the jars has the second list. Only after the taste test is complete are the lists combined and the identities of the ciders known to all.

The person pouring the ciders fills each of the jars and applies a temporary label to each with a unique letter on each label (I purposely excluded ambiguous letters like I and O to avoid confusion). The contents of each jar is recorded in the first sheet.

Next, a person who was not present at the pouring and only sees the jars with their lettered labels must randomize the jars. To do this, they have a stack of note cards, each with a letter written on it. The stack is shuffled, and the original temporary label is replaced with the note card. The person doing this writes down the original letter and the replacement letter on the second sheet. The person who poured the cider into the jars cannot be present for this.

Sheet 1	Sheet 2
Jar Cider A Red Cider B Green Cider C Blue Cider D Yellow Cider	Original Label Replaced Label A B B D C A D C

Once the randomization is complete, as long as nobody has access to both lists, nobody will know what cider is in which jar.

To do the taste testing, we used small plastic cups and poured about 1.5 ounces into each cup. Since there were 14 people taking part in the taste test, we only needed about 24 ounces of each cider to go around (2 cans or bottles were poured into each jar). With 15 different ciders, that resulted in only about two bottles of cider being drunk per person, so nobody got intoxicated from the experiment. I also put out spit cups for the light-weights, or the more unappealing flavors.

This was far from a perfect experiment, because you could still visually see the color of the cider. Berry ciders were obvious from their pink color, and dry ciders were obvious from their paleness. A blind-folded experiment would eliminate this, but that would be much harder to do on a large scale.

Rating Process

In order to rate and rank the various ciders, I made up a set of note cards for each participant with letters that corresponded to the ciders. Each participant could write down notes about how they enjoyed or disliked each cider, but was expected to rate each cider on a scale of 1 to 4. After we had tasted every cider, I used a geometric scale with a common ratio of 2 to derive a weighted value for the 1-4 rating. This results in 1 = 1, 2 = 2, 3 = 4, and 4 = 8. These were then summed up and used to rank the ciders. In previous rating systems I've used, I found that this yields much better results than a simple average or summation. Both the weighted rating and resulting rank is seen in the table above.

Takeaways

There were several interesting takeaways from this experiment. Many of us, myself included, discovered that some of the ciders which we've always thought were pretty good, rated rather low. For example, I've always been fond of Virtue Cider, but all three of those tested resulted in the bottom five. Another thing I noticed was that several of the people who said they prefer dry over sweet flavors still ended up ranking the sweets higher. Finally, my favorite cider, Strongbow Gold, ended up being raked the highest by the whole group. Even those participants who didn't care for cider, and ranked most of them low, still gave it a high rank.