December 4, 2011 - 8:31am

It was my delight to be responsible for  much  of  the tasting  and  drinking  experiments  that  are  an  obvious part  of  the  development  of  that  delicious  liquid-  Guinness.  It  was  in  connection  with  this  that  I  began to  realize  how  impossible  it  is  to  find  human  beings    without  biases,  without  prejudices,  and  without the  delightful  idiosyncrasies  which  make  them  so  fascinating  ....  We  all  have  prejudices  about  certain numbers,  letters,  or  colours,  and  all  of  us  are  very superstitious.  We  all  behave  irrationally.  I  well  remember  an  expensive  experiment  set  up  to discover  the  temperature  at  which  beer  was  preferred. This  involved  subjects  sitting  in  rooms  at  various temperatures,  drinking  beers  at  various  other temperatures.  Little  men  in  white  coats  ran  up  and downstairs  with  beer  in  buckets  of  water  at  varying temperatures,  thermometers  abounded  and  an  air  of  bustle  prevailed.  The  beers  were  identified  by coloured  crown  seals,  and  the  only  clear-cut  result  of  this  experiment  ...  was  that  our  drinking  panel showed  that  the  only  thing  that  mattered  to  them  was  the  colour  of  the  crown  seals  and  that  they  did  not  like  beer  with  yellow  crown  seals.

~ Possibly from one of the Presidential address the Royal Statistical Society