Women Make Better Beer Tasters

Today is International Women's Day. It's time to buy a women a beer today. They'll teach you a thing or two.

Women Make Better Beer Tasters

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 by Liz

There are many things that women generally tend to excel at – raising children, coordinating fashionable outfits, baking and gossiping. Also, according to recent statistics, women are now better at graduating college and being employed. This blog post, however is about women’s superior beer tasting skills.

According to this article, SABMiller is hiring more and more female taste-testers. Apparently, their "sensitive woman-tongues can taste certain flavor subtleties better than men."

Despite the fact that men account for 72.8% of all beer sales (worldwide), the makers of Miller and Coors brands, Pilsner Urquell, Peroni and Grolsch are convinced that women can better detect undesirable chemicals that make beer taste skunky. The company has 1,000 advanced-level tasters and 30% of them are female – that number has more or less quadrupled over the last decade. The "Taster of the Year" at SABMiller is a 33-year-old female with an "unusual knack for identifying extremely low levels of troublesome chemicals." She chalks it up to her "love affair with perfumes."

There haven’t been any scientific studies to prove this hunch but the folks over at Carlsberg A/S tested their taste-test panelists this year and noted that they’ve observed women performing better than men. Marcia Pelchat of the Monell Chemical Senses Center seems to think that we can chalk up the female edge to the fact that women can usually smell things better.

This may sound harsh but in my humble opinion, everyone on the Miller Coors tasting panel should get their noses and tongues checked. Most of that stuff tastes like grade-A garbage to me… then again, I’m a woman so I’m in tune to that stuff, right?

It’s a fun little idea to ponder but at the same time, men can still pee standing up. In my mind, that certainly trumps the whole smelling thing.

TAGS [ TASTE TESTING | BEER REVIEWS | BEER TASTE TESTER ]

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