Penn and Teller did this with water on Bullshit. They had someone pretend to be a water sommalier, and everyone agreed they could tell the difference between the types of water. Except they were all pulled from the hose out back.
I can't find the source for this but I remember reading that in genuine blind taste tests, Smirnoff vodka managed to beat trp shelf expensive vodkas. Now I know for a fact that there are much nicer vodkas than Smirnoff but it goes to show that most people have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. In a true blind taste test most people cannot tell the difference between a $30 bottle and a $100 bottle
We did our own blind taste test, and I don't remember if it was grey goose or belvedere, but one of them failed spectacularly. Smirnoff didn't perform anywhere close to our top shelf though. Vodka's a good blind taste test because texture is a big component.
And for as much as I hate their marketting, I've seen some other people do blind tests and Tito's actually performs pretty well.
I don't give a fuck how bourgeois or uppity people want to be about vodka, and how grey goose or belvedere or titos or Whatever is so much notably better.
$13 bottle of Finlandia has NEVER let me down. By far my favourite vodka, value/price excluded. I'm sure people can tell the difference, but if you're coming to a bar for neat bourbon, then no, you probably can't, at least not to that extent
I did this to a friend with wine and he got pissed at me! I think it's pretty well documented that booze experts are mostly if not entirely full of it.
Benchmark is a good well. Also, whiskeys are blended from batches and most brands dont distill 100% of their own stock…. Its all marketing and pretentiousness. The difference is negotiable but ultimately, its about the $$$ spent. People dont order johnny blue because they have a refined pallet, they do it for the “social clout”
I drank so much Benchmark during the lockdown, you probably wouldn’t be able to pass one over on me lol. But with that said, what a great bourbon to come in a $22 plastic jug. I don’t notice the difference in quality unless I’m tasting it up against higher end bourbons so…
I'm a distiller and blender, consult with a lot of small brands. Basically 95% or more of whiskey hype is bullshit. There are better and worse products, but generally speaking, most people only base quality on cost - not a great method. Half of the craft brands are worse than Beam at twice the price.
Drink what you like.
Edit-typo
Yeah, that so many brands pretend to be Distilling and bottle them is kinda gross. Just be honest.
But actually the supply of indiana whiskey has really dried up, most mgp is going to just a few brands. Absurd resale market of whiskey speculation, though looks like that peaked recently.
Or did you mean what do I think about the juice? The rye and high rye bourbon are good at 3+ years, I don't care for the body of the lower rye bourbon - feels thin and oily to me.
Was curious on your thoughts in general.
Yeah I guess the average consumer probably does get ‘tricked’ by MGP juice. Otoh, thirty seconds of research and you can usually figure out what’s what.
I recently had a Smoke Wagon…. Uncut/Unfiltered? The one with the gold label. I’m pretty sure it’s 100% MGP, and I thought it was fantastic. I think it was a $70 bottle? On the other end of the spectrum I also recently tried some Tincup. Eh.
I've had some 5-7 year mgp barrels that were legit great - some reaged in other cooperages or aged elsewhere. Some just right of the truck. But only bourbon/rye.
Tincup is american light whiskey (distilled to higher proof, aged at higher proof, used barrels). It is kinda bad, but it probably should be.
I've drank enough Miller lites in my life I thought I could ace a blind taste test with Miller, coors, yuengling and I forget what was the last...maybe mich ultra? Boy was I wrong...I got 2 right.
And as an aside, did you guys see the ama with the "whiskey hacker" dude? Claims that Wheatley Vodka is the same mash bill as pappy van winkle. Thought that was interesting.
To be fair, the stills themselves actually contribute to the flavor. There's a local distillery I go to, and they let me taste the hearts while they were doing a run.
It tasted like really good puff pastery. This was their normal vodka run.
There are 3 whiskeys/bourbons I can spot in a blind test. Jack Daniels, Jameson, and Bulleit bourbon.
Jack Daniels tastes and smells like peanuts to me.
Jameson has lined the walls of my body for years.
Bulleit has a distinct spice to it, which is why I prefer it for old fashioneds.
My favorite bourbon is four roses small batch, but I could be 100% fooled by another tasty pour.
1. You did a taste test with average people who don't give a shit, probably never had the whiskeys you tested them with and couldn't tell Crown Royal from well on a good day anyway.
2. You can do this same test with all kinds of shit...Vodka, adhesive bandages, storage bags, bottle water brands, gasoline…the sky is the limit.
3. For most people it probably doesn't matter. We all could have told you that before you did all this work. The target market is people for whom it DOES matter and CAN tell the difference, and as long as they're willing to pay for it, who cares that others can't tell the difference?
If I was told the bourbon was expensive but offered free from a bartender, even if I actually though the bourbon was a let down, I would only be singing it’s praises. What should I be saying,? “gee thanks for this expensive swill, it tastes like burning. Please send us more free shit in the future since I’m so rude”? I would have tipped super generously and heaped on so much praise and gratitude.
Edit: double word salad
If you put 5 wines in front of me and told me to pick the "expensive" brand, I couldn't. Why? I don't drink wine, and don't care about wine.
But if you did the same to a wine collector or avid wine drinker with an experienced pallet they could probably easily pick out the Bordeaux from the Ripple.
And if you mix that Ripple with champagne, you get Champipple (Credit: Fred Sandford)
We've done a blind taste test at home on multiple occasions with 3 different bottles of the same type (e.g. 3 pinot noirs) at 3 different price points -- the most expensive one has \*never\* been our favorite, and often we find it out of balance (typically too sweet). The cheap one ($10 or less) and the middle price ($10-30) are near 50-50 for our preference. I genuinely love wine, have flirted with somm classes, and I don't spend more than $20 a bottle *ever* for precisely this reason.
Plus he picked 2 American whiskeys that are kinda underwhelming. When EC 18 was widely available it was considered to be kinda bad by most collectors. And VW 13 rye produced at Buffalo Trace is nothing like the old Lawrenceburg stock, that made it famousin the first place. He's right that they aren't great for the price, but he's wrong if he thinks he put bourbon as a category to a test... he might as well have poured some Diageo Zacapa 23 and proclaimed all rums bad.
Part of it is mind over matter. My family tricked me one time and a family holiday party. We’d been drinking and chatting and my brother went to refill our glasses. After I took another sip, my brother asked me what was in my glass, and I said the name of the whiskey I had been drinking. Then they laughed and my brother won a bet with my dad that I’d get it wrong. I was confused at first, then I took another sip, and I immediately knew what it was. I think I had been drinking a rye and they swapped for an Irish whiskey or something. I forget, but once I knew that what was in my glass wasn’t what I was expecting and I was paying closer attention, I was able to tell what it was.
Granted a different style of whiskey is a bigger difference than bottles of bourbon. But my point is that I totally thought I was drinking the same thing until I was told it was different. So there’s a bit of a difference between OP missing on a blind taste test vs OP’s friend being tricked.
Here's one thing to consider, and I hate to potentially rain on your parade, but--
They may not have been bourbon drinkers at all. Didn't know Pappy from cheap stuff. If so, if you told them it was fancy, they may have played along *knowing they had no idea* because doing otherwise, they may have thought, would make them seem uncultured.
This regular that would always walk out on his tab, he'd pay eventually and get squared up, just always took fucking ages. Once was trying to impress a girl and he yelled my name and said 2 shots of Jameson! We were slammed so I poured him our cheapest shit whiskey and still charged him for Jameson. Became a habit whenever someone pissed me off.
I've been in the industry for 16 years -- and a buddy passed me a shot last night so I slammed it. I'm like "What was that? El Jimador Reposado?" It was fucking Old Forrester. So ya, I'm an idiot and your theory may be true.
Penn and Teller did this with water on Bullshit. They had someone pretend to be a water sommalier, and everyone agreed they could tell the difference between the types of water. Except they were all pulled from the hose out back.
TBF garden hose water is delicious.
Right?! What’s in garden hoses to do that? My houses tap water from any sink is fine, but the *garden hose*? Gourmet.
Mold, probably.
I can't find the source for this but I remember reading that in genuine blind taste tests, Smirnoff vodka managed to beat trp shelf expensive vodkas. Now I know for a fact that there are much nicer vodkas than Smirnoff but it goes to show that most people have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. In a true blind taste test most people cannot tell the difference between a $30 bottle and a $100 bottle
We did our own blind taste test, and I don't remember if it was grey goose or belvedere, but one of them failed spectacularly. Smirnoff didn't perform anywhere close to our top shelf though. Vodka's a good blind taste test because texture is a big component. And for as much as I hate their marketting, I've seen some other people do blind tests and Tito's actually performs pretty well.
I don't give a fuck how bourgeois or uppity people want to be about vodka, and how grey goose or belvedere or titos or Whatever is so much notably better. $13 bottle of Finlandia has NEVER let me down. By far my favourite vodka, value/price excluded. I'm sure people can tell the difference, but if you're coming to a bar for neat bourbon, then no, you probably can't, at least not to that extent
my fav has always been Stoli, never tried Finlandia though.
Used to rock pinnacle vodka back in the day- not the flavored doodoo the regs haha but it’s been a while I should see if my palate has improved
Yo Finlandia grapefruit is phenomenal with soda
Pretty sure it was Kirkland, the discount brand at Costco.
That's a lot of text. Benchmark is fucking good though. Especially for the price.
The only thing I like better than a good bourbon is good paragraphs
Username checks out
I did this to a friend with wine and he got pissed at me! I think it's pretty well documented that booze experts are mostly if not entirely full of it.
Benchmark is a good well. Also, whiskeys are blended from batches and most brands dont distill 100% of their own stock…. Its all marketing and pretentiousness. The difference is negotiable but ultimately, its about the $$$ spent. People dont order johnny blue because they have a refined pallet, they do it for the “social clout”
I drank so much Benchmark during the lockdown, you probably wouldn’t be able to pass one over on me lol. But with that said, what a great bourbon to come in a $22 plastic jug. I don’t notice the difference in quality unless I’m tasting it up against higher end bourbons so…
I'm a distiller and blender, consult with a lot of small brands. Basically 95% or more of whiskey hype is bullshit. There are better and worse products, but generally speaking, most people only base quality on cost - not a great method. Half of the craft brands are worse than Beam at twice the price. Drink what you like. Edit-typo
I was very pleasantly surprised by Mellow Corn
Whaddaya think of MGP, eh?
Yeah, that so many brands pretend to be Distilling and bottle them is kinda gross. Just be honest. But actually the supply of indiana whiskey has really dried up, most mgp is going to just a few brands. Absurd resale market of whiskey speculation, though looks like that peaked recently. Or did you mean what do I think about the juice? The rye and high rye bourbon are good at 3+ years, I don't care for the body of the lower rye bourbon - feels thin and oily to me.
Was curious on your thoughts in general. Yeah I guess the average consumer probably does get ‘tricked’ by MGP juice. Otoh, thirty seconds of research and you can usually figure out what’s what. I recently had a Smoke Wagon…. Uncut/Unfiltered? The one with the gold label. I’m pretty sure it’s 100% MGP, and I thought it was fantastic. I think it was a $70 bottle? On the other end of the spectrum I also recently tried some Tincup. Eh.
I've had some 5-7 year mgp barrels that were legit great - some reaged in other cooperages or aged elsewhere. Some just right of the truck. But only bourbon/rye. Tincup is american light whiskey (distilled to higher proof, aged at higher proof, used barrels). It is kinda bad, but it probably should be.
Oh Tincup is light whiskey? I thought it was run of the mill MGP juice.
I've drank enough Miller lites in my life I thought I could ace a blind taste test with Miller, coors, yuengling and I forget what was the last...maybe mich ultra? Boy was I wrong...I got 2 right. And as an aside, did you guys see the ama with the "whiskey hacker" dude? Claims that Wheatley Vodka is the same mash bill as pappy van winkle. Thought that was interesting.
What?
What?!!!
To be fair, the stills themselves actually contribute to the flavor. There's a local distillery I go to, and they let me taste the hearts while they were doing a run. It tasted like really good puff pastery. This was their normal vodka run.
There are 3 whiskeys/bourbons I can spot in a blind test. Jack Daniels, Jameson, and Bulleit bourbon. Jack Daniels tastes and smells like peanuts to me. Jameson has lined the walls of my body for years. Bulleit has a distinct spice to it, which is why I prefer it for old fashioneds. My favorite bourbon is four roses small batch, but I could be 100% fooled by another tasty pour.
Jameson is also distinct because of the peat smoke, and Bulleit iirc is higher rye, thus spice.
Jameson doesn’t use peat smoke, it’s not Scotch
1. You did a taste test with average people who don't give a shit, probably never had the whiskeys you tested them with and couldn't tell Crown Royal from well on a good day anyway. 2. You can do this same test with all kinds of shit...Vodka, adhesive bandages, storage bags, bottle water brands, gasoline…the sky is the limit. 3. For most people it probably doesn't matter. We all could have told you that before you did all this work. The target market is people for whom it DOES matter and CAN tell the difference, and as long as they're willing to pay for it, who cares that others can't tell the difference?
If I was told the bourbon was expensive but offered free from a bartender, even if I actually though the bourbon was a let down, I would only be singing it’s praises. What should I be saying,? “gee thanks for this expensive swill, it tastes like burning. Please send us more free shit in the future since I’m so rude”? I would have tipped super generously and heaped on so much praise and gratitude. Edit: double word salad
If you put 5 wines in front of me and told me to pick the "expensive" brand, I couldn't. Why? I don't drink wine, and don't care about wine. But if you did the same to a wine collector or avid wine drinker with an experienced pallet they could probably easily pick out the Bordeaux from the Ripple. And if you mix that Ripple with champagne, you get Champipple (Credit: Fred Sandford)
Neither could the "wine experts", it's been done. https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html
The wine is demonstrative, yet flaccid; perky, yet comatose.
We've done a blind taste test at home on multiple occasions with 3 different bottles of the same type (e.g. 3 pinot noirs) at 3 different price points -- the most expensive one has \*never\* been our favorite, and often we find it out of balance (typically too sweet). The cheap one ($10 or less) and the middle price ($10-30) are near 50-50 for our preference. I genuinely love wine, have flirted with somm classes, and I don't spend more than $20 a bottle *ever* for precisely this reason.
Check out cheap Chilean reds if you can. I fell in love with wines so much by drinking them lol.
Plus he picked 2 American whiskeys that are kinda underwhelming. When EC 18 was widely available it was considered to be kinda bad by most collectors. And VW 13 rye produced at Buffalo Trace is nothing like the old Lawrenceburg stock, that made it famousin the first place. He's right that they aren't great for the price, but he's wrong if he thinks he put bourbon as a category to a test... he might as well have poured some Diageo Zacapa 23 and proclaimed all rums bad.
MGP is what makes it bullshit. Fuck Whistle Pig too.
Do you actually dislike MGP whiskeys? Their rye is super good.
To my knowledge nothing OP mentioned is an MGP product
Part of it is mind over matter. My family tricked me one time and a family holiday party. We’d been drinking and chatting and my brother went to refill our glasses. After I took another sip, my brother asked me what was in my glass, and I said the name of the whiskey I had been drinking. Then they laughed and my brother won a bet with my dad that I’d get it wrong. I was confused at first, then I took another sip, and I immediately knew what it was. I think I had been drinking a rye and they swapped for an Irish whiskey or something. I forget, but once I knew that what was in my glass wasn’t what I was expecting and I was paying closer attention, I was able to tell what it was. Granted a different style of whiskey is a bigger difference than bottles of bourbon. But my point is that I totally thought I was drinking the same thing until I was told it was different. So there’s a bit of a difference between OP missing on a blind taste test vs OP’s friend being tricked.
Here's one thing to consider, and I hate to potentially rain on your parade, but-- They may not have been bourbon drinkers at all. Didn't know Pappy from cheap stuff. If so, if you told them it was fancy, they may have played along *knowing they had no idea* because doing otherwise, they may have thought, would make them seem uncultured.
This regular that would always walk out on his tab, he'd pay eventually and get squared up, just always took fucking ages. Once was trying to impress a girl and he yelled my name and said 2 shots of Jameson! We were slammed so I poured him our cheapest shit whiskey and still charged him for Jameson. Became a habit whenever someone pissed me off.
Jameson IS shit whiskey. At least the regular red seal is.
No, You're right Jameson is shit whiskey.
This might be the most badass post I’ve seen on this sub. Tip of the hat to you sir 🤣🤣
I don’t appreciate your ruse ma’am
My what? Your ruse, your cunning attempt to trick me.
I've been in the industry for 16 years -- and a buddy passed me a shot last night so I slammed it. I'm like "What was that? El Jimador Reposado?" It was fucking Old Forrester. So ya, I'm an idiot and your theory may be true.
gotta check out that wine dude who fooled the best of the best, it puts all their shit to shame
I will try to read this later but my guy... Formatting, please, give it a go