Internal and external mapping of preferences for commercial lager beers: comparison of hedonic ratings by consumers blind versus with knowledge of brand and price

The individual preferences of 170 consumers in six categories of age (20s, 30s, 40s) and gender (men, women) for 24 domestic, imported or specialty lager beers, tasted first blind and then with knowledge of brand and price, were investigated by preference mapping techniques. Internal preference mapping revealed differences in the preferences of consumers, with some consumers preferring domestic or ice beers, and others preferring specialty or imported beers. Hedonic ratings changed significantly from the blind to the informed tasting condition, particularly for consumers in their twenties, thereby documenting the significant role of non-sensory variables in the formulation of a hedonic judgement by the consumer. In an external preference map relating the consumers' hedonic ratings to the first two principal components of a principal component analysis of descriptive ratings for the 23 beers, 75% of the consumers were fitted by the vectorial, circular, elliptical (with maximum or saddle point) or quadratic AUTO-FIT models, at the required minimum level of significance (P less than or equal to 0.25 for wrongly not simplifying the model, and P less than or equal to 0.25 for wrongly selecting a consumer). This improvement over previous studies is credited to the high number of samples (24) in the design, and to the large differences in sensory properties among samples. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.