*length=3:00 "can't judge a book by it's tank top"

The duration of this video has been updated from unknown to 3:00 - length declared by PlayhousePals.

There must be some sort of terminology for where the trialists try to appease the researchers by giving them what they perceive to be the right results.

Also, 7 bucks seems pretty reasonableif your beans have been hand picked half way across the world at a fair wage

They should have paired the $7 cup vs. something from McDonald's.

Good, now make fun of all the wine snobs.

Studies reliably find that wine experts doing blind taste tests can't distinguish between expensive bottles of wine and the reasonable bottles of wine they'd normally disdain.

Takeaway lesson: There are more important things in life than minute differences in consumption goods.

citation needed.

I find that hard to believe. I'm not a wine expert by any means, but even I can taste the difference between a crappy $10 bottle of wine and a decent $30 one. Beyond that, it's diminishing returns (or is that what you mean by "reasonable bottles").

And as for starbucks, their coffee is awful, and even if it wasn't I'd much rather support a local business.

Do you remember being outraged at Pulp Fictions $5 shake? Seems like a good deal these days.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/apr/14/expensive-wine-cheap-plonk-taste

Not a study involving experts. Totally believable that on average people can't tell the difference. But I wonder if there were outliers. Were any of the subjects able to do it with surprising accuracy? Were some wines consistently rated high/low priced?

Not saying I can discriminate price--and price is not a good discriminator on whether it tastes good--but wines definitely taste differently from one another.

@ChaosEngine

Wine-tasting is mostly in our minds:


"In one test, Brochet included fifty-four wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert said that it was “jammy,”5 while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.”

"Another test that Brochet conducted was even more damning. He took a middling Bordeaux and served it in two different bottles. One bottle bore the label of a fancy grand cru, the other of an ordinary vin de table. Although they were being served the exact same wine, the experts gave the bottles nearly opposite descriptions. The grand cru was summarized as being “agreeable,” “woody,” “complex,” “balanced,” and “rounded,” while the most popular adjectives for the vin de table included “weak,” “short,” “light,” “flat,” and “faulty.”"

New Yorker

These still all involve priming people to be prepared to expect one thing or another. Blindfold a bunch of people. Arrange a bunch of reds and whites. Have people taste them in random orders. Can we get consistent descriptors? Do people in general rate particular wines as better than others? As more enjoyable (not the same thing)? Do individuals consistently rate certain types of wine higher?

The perception of price definitely influences what people expect. No doubt. Expecting to taste a red will make a white taste more like a red, no doubt. But if there's no prompting, can people distinguish? I've never seen something like that.

The little 'gotcha' trick studies mostly just prove that the differences are/can be small enough that people can convince themselves to ignore them--which is fine, fair, and reasonable, but shouldn't be the end.

I pretty exclusively buy random $8 bottles of red wine with no preconceptions about how they'll taste, and there are some I like way better than others.

There is a term for such a bias: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_characteristics

Most North Americans have no idea what actual coffee tastes like in the first place, and I'm no coffee snob (at least compared to some of my friends back in Melbourne), but I've never had a really good cup of coffee here. At the best it's been adequate.

As for wine differences, are you serious? I never liked red wine, until I had some actual "good" red wine. Yes some of the cheaper brands can be quite good, but generally if it's a $30 bottle, it's going to be better than that $10 bottle (and much better than that box)

Mythbusters did it twice: once with Vodka and once with Steak.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO077nu2m5E

Although I don't think this clip has the part where they tried to eat it . . . with a professional chef cooking it. They resulted to using a pressure sensor to actually see how much pressure it took to slice through because the taste tests came back all wonky for some off reason.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcP8VVB8R1U

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

I've always felt that wine experts were making science of it to give an excuse to their alcoholism. "I'm not a wino, I'm a sommelier, damn it!"

FTR, my wine usually comes in a cardboard box - and I mix it with bubbly water.

*facepalm*

In a blind matching task I was able to correctly identify seven out of 12 random fizzy yellow american lagers.