Double Blind Party
WHAT'S A DOUBLE BLIND PARTY?
A Double Blind Party is a social gathering with a specially designed taste test. No one at the party - including the host - knows which product they are tasting while the taste test is happening. The identities of the various samples are revealed only when everyone is done sampling, at which time we also get reports on how everyone rated the samples.
"Double Blind" is a standard term used by scientists, defined on Wikipedia as:
an especially stringent way of conducting an experiment - usually, on human test subjects - which attempts to eliminate subjective, unrecognized biases carried by an experiment's subjects and conductors.
WHO CARES?
Almost all parties involve food and beverage. And talking about that food and beverage. For whatever reason, people love chatting about what they like and don't like to consume.
Taste tests are fun. It's fun to sample similar foods and beverages to compare them. It can also be useful: grocery stores today contain a dizzying array of products, it's always comforting to identify a label that we know that we like. Taste tests give us a way to make purchasing and cooking decisions based on what should matter most about food. Where is the proof of the pudding?
But actually, people's experiences of food and drink are greatly influenced by factors other than taste. Among the things that affect our perception: price, packaging, marketing, presentation. Blind taste tests attempt to strip that all away and focus on the tasting. Simply present all of the samples in neutral containers so that the tasters can't tell which product is which, and now we're more focused on the tasting.
So, say you want to conduct a blind taste test. The obvious way to do it involves someone keeping track of which product is which in the neutral containers. That knowledge, though, can be annoying. The person who knows which product is which might unintentionally influence the tasters based on his or her own biases related to the items being sampled. And more directly, the person with this knowledge can't participate as a blind study subject!
doubleblindparty.com provides an easy way to get around these issues. We've got a trick to conducting blind taste tests where no one involved knows which product is which. All you need is an assistant and some extra containers. We've done our best to make the rest easy.