If you’re like me, you take your Root Beer pretty seriously. I even have gone so far to proclaim myself a Root Beer aficionado. Which is why it came as a shock to me that one day one of my closest friends blatantly said that Mugs Root Beer is better then Dad’s. The nerve! That is why I challenged him and a few of my other friends to a blind taste test to get this sorted out, and here is how that went.
MATERIALS
If you want to follow along at home and create your own blind test to prove to your friends how wrong they are, you are going to need a few things. The list here is mostly for a taste test involving a liquid of sorts, but you could modify it to how ever you see fit.
1. Paper
Only used to make place cards for the drinks. Take a regular sheet of paper, cut small pieces and fold them in half. On the inside, write down the brand name of the product, and on the outside just write a letter from the alphabet. Best to use clean, white sheet paper. Or you could be a Neanderthal like me and use lined paper. What ever you have jammed in your home printer will work.
2. Sharpie Marker
You need this to write on the paper. You really don’t need specifically Sharpie brand, you could just use any marker, pen, pencil or any other type of writing utensil you want. You could even use your own blood. I chose to us the Sharpie, and save my blood for other things.
3. Cups
Glass is best used, as its reusable and I feel like being a hippy, but really for those of you that are just to lazy to wash dishes you could just get plastic cups to hold the Root Beer. Use your gut instinct on this one, go with something that works best for you to hold a liquid…hell, you could literally use a gut to hold it. What ever your into, you do you. I’ll just stay way the hell away from you, you weirdo.
4. Blindfold
This could be any type of cloth or fabric. As long as it covers the testers eyes and they can’t see through. I chose to use an old pair of underwear, cut up and wrapped around my friends faces. Mainly to see the look on their face when I tell them what it was minutes after it’s been put on.
5. Root Beer
Now, this one might seem obvious, but sometimes you need to make these types of DIY instructions idiot proof. For our test, we got 8 different brands of Root Beer: Barq’s, A & W, Dad’s, Mug, Jarritos, Jones Soda, Boylan’s, and Stewart’s. Each one will be placed into 6 separate cups, allowing the 6 taste testers one drink of each brand. These will be represented by letters of the alphabet on the place card in front, so we don’t know which drink is which. Each tester will then score the drink from a 1 to an 8. 1 being the lowest, 8 being the highest. Votes will be tallied at the end, and everyone will see how good Dad’s brand is.
6. People willing to be blindfolded and have strange liquids shoved down their throat
This one is tricky, so you might want to mention what it’s for. I don’t recommend getting random people off the street, blindfolding them, sticking them in a van and bringing them to an unmarked location to do this. That didn’t work the last time I tried, and I’m not really sure why. Just learn from my mistakes. Anyways, for this go around I conned a few of my friends to figure out the best brand (Dad’s).
And there you have it. We got all this together and will be showing the results next Sunday, February 13th, 2016 around 6 PM Central time. Hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and see you next week for the results!