Drinking in the name of…science.
When we came up with the idea to find the perfect bourbon for an old fashioned, there was a lot of back and forth discussion.
“Okay, it’s going to be 5 bourbons, and we need to include the really popular bottles” I said, as Devon pulled out her Homebar planning notebook and reflectively poised her pen above the paper.
She scribbled silently for a few seconds. “Okay…” she began, “Which ones do you think we should include?”
I counted on my fingers, raising each digit successively as I listed the bottles aloud. “Buffalo Trace Flagship, Knob Creek…Wild Turkey 101…Bulleit Bourbon…and I’m thinking…Woodford Reserve to finish it out.”
“Okay” she said slowly as she scribbled again on her notebook. “So no Maker’s Mark?”
Oof. Yeah, she was right. Though it is a wheated bourbon which made it different from the rest of the pack, it’s a hugely popular bottle that needed to be considered. I took a moment to ponder.
“Yeah, I can’t believe I missed that one. Well, I guess it’ll have to be six bourbons then? Kind of an odd number of whiskeys to try, but we have to have Maker’s Mark.”
She scribbled yet again. “What about some of the other big selling bottles like Evan Williams or Jim Beam White Label? Or how about other brands like Four Roses?”
My head started to spin as I considered what five bottles should be considered in our experiment. ‘Pick 5 bottles of bourbon’ quickly went from an easy task that turned into something completely unachievable. There was no other option in my mind. We had to expand the number of bottles to consider.
“It has to be more than five, and even more than 10, I think” I said. “Let’s just include everything, but we have to cap it off somewhere. Let’s just do 15.”
Devon stopped writing and looked up, with a look that seemed both confused and sour.
“So you want to do 15 bourbons, and 15 Old Fashioneds in one night?” The impracticality rung loudly in her soft voice.
“Yeah, it’s going to have to be done in several days” I responded. Devon heartily agreed, and it seemed as though we had made our choice.
15 bourbons, two weeks, end to end. An Old Fashioned marathon of sorts.
Now that we knew what we were dealing with, it was time to devise a plan for a proper test.
The method to our madness.
It was obvious to us that we were going to have a hard time judging these with preconceived notions. There simply was no choice but to have it be a blind test.
We figured that it couldn’t be a double blind since we had to actually pour the bottles, but at the very least we needed to make those bottles totally random when tasting.
So we pondered over a testing method that allowed for total anonymity. A ‘March Madness’ style, head-to-head bracket matchup? No…it would be too easy to potentially identify between the two whiskeys we had poured, head to head. How about we test them in threes? Drink them as a group and rank from best to worst? Better, but still a bit easier to detect what had been poured if it were only 3 at a time.
Ultimately, the best system we could come up with had us tasting the bourbons in groups of five (which ends up being three groups). Within each group, we would rank our favorite to least favorite, going from 1 (favorite) to 5 (least favorite).
Then we would take the ones from each group and put them together for a matchup, then the twos, threes and so on:
From there, we ranked the ones from favorite to least favorite, twos, threes, fours and fives:
And that’s how we came up to our overall ranking! This included a lot of drinking and ranking, and also why it took us two weeks to get through all of it. Yes, our livers quivered, but our spirit would not be broken. After several rounds of cocktails we were ready to reveal our list. So without further ado, here is where the chips fell.
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