Fun at INESAD Serious fun at work
INESAD’s Beer and Book Club organized a beer tasting event on the 17th of June 2016. The challenge was to correctly identify as many as possible of 15 different beers from Bolivia, Mexico, Honduras, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium.
That turned out to be extraordinarily difficult. Nobody could identify their own favorite beer in a lineup. Nobody could identify the Paceña, which is what we usually drink at INESAD. And 75% of the participants got exactly zero beers right. If you just chose randomly, the probability of getting at least one right is 64% (1-(14/15)^15), so they did a whole lot worse than random.
The remaining two participants tied for the first place, with two beers out of 15 correctly identified. As it happens, neither had ever before tasted the two beers they correctly identified, so they did not feel particularly victorious after winning. Here they are, however, Jose and Lykke, with the three beers that they liked most, although they did not correctly identify any of those.
Anna Sophia and Montserrat volunteered to serve the beer, so they didn’t participate in the competition. Anna Sophia never drinks beer, so she might actually have won the competition if she had participated and just made random guesses without even tasting.
Lykke had created the 18 tasting glasses out of Corona bottles, so she should at least have been able to identify the Corona.
The contestants were also asked to point out the beers that they most liked. The following three beers got the most votes: Barena from Honduras, Corona from Mexico, and Heineken from the Netherlands.
But since we can’t really tell the difference anyway, it is unlikely that we will start importing beer from Honduras on a regular basis. It was difficult enough for Susana to get a single can through customs during her last field trip to Honduras.
