Pop Quiz

Here is the much anticipated guest blog on Foodiestudent. Notes in italics and bold are my own. Hey, it's my blog and I can't have anyone TOTALLY take the spotlight from me :D. With that in mind, take it away, Louisa........

Hello there, gentle readers! This is a guest post by Vicky’s (ahem, Foodiestudent or FS) sister, Louisa. A couple weeks ago I suggested she try this “pop quiz” for her blog, but the more I talked about it, the more I realized that I wanted to do this experiment myself, not just read about it on her blog. So she agreed to let me do a guest post and here we are! (I am nothing if not generous!)

For this experiment, I made homemade pop by mixing various types of syrup with club soda. Then I recruited some coworkers and we taste-tested them all.

(Note: During the taste test, most of us simply drank the pop and rated it. But we had a couple of wine aficionados in the group who swirled, sniffed, and sipped the pop, then used words like “bouquet” and “low notes” to describe it. Awesome!)

The syrups:

1. Homemade raspberry syrup made from fresh, locally grown, organic raspberries (made by my boss’s husband!)
2. Maple syrup
3. Ice Java (sweet coffee syrup that you’re supposed to add to milk)
4. Ribena (blackcurrant syrup)

Here you can see how much syrup we put in each glass. This also shows the order in which we conducted the taste test (raspberry, Ribena, maple, Ice Java):

And here they are after adding the club soda (we used canned Canada Dry club soda):

We thought it was pretty funny how the Ice Java pop looks like Guinness. :) (the foam on the "Guinness" looks so thick it could be eaten with a spoon)

We had 11 taste-testers, including myself, and each pop was rated on a scale of 1-5 points, with 5 being the best. People could also add comments. The results:

Raspberry pop:

• Scores ranged from 4 to 5, with an average score of 4.7
• "Smells and tastes fantastic"
• "Not too sweet but still really fruity; delicious!"
• "Much tastier than real pop!"
• "Fresh-tasting flavor"

Ribena:

• Scores ranged from 3 to 5, with an average score of 4.1
• "Good flavor but not as good as raspberry"
• "Tangy, less sweet"
• "Bland"
• "Not quite as fresh tasting [as the raspberry]"

Maple:

• Scores ranged from 1 to 5, with an average score of 3.2
• "Much too sugary"
• "Good and sugary"
• "Delicious! A sweet treat"
• "Yuck!! I didn’t even finish it. (Adding Ribena did NOT help)" (Maple and Ribena... just the thought makes me cringe)

Ice Java:

• Scores ranged from -1 to 5, with an average score of 2.6
• "Tastes like a hardware store. Disgusting" (I got my best belly laugh in months from this comment)
• "Good bouquet. Great coffee undertones"
• "Big head, short taste" (Due to my ladylike nature I shall refrain from snickering at this)
• "Not good for non-coffee lovers"

Here are all the individual ratings. We were fairly consistent in liking the fruit-based pops, but varied widely with the more unusual maple and Ice Java pops:

Average scores:

Incidentally, I work at a university and all my taste-testers are researchers. They offered some comments about the research methods and results: (*cough*geeks*cough*)

• For each round of testing, we had the same person pour the syrup, to make the quantities as consistent as possible (without actually bothering to measure). However, we each poured our own club soda, filling the glasses from 1/3 to 1/2 full. (Perhaps mixing each flavor in a pitcher and pouring into the cups would have been a better method, hindsight being 20/20 and all)


• We noticed that the scores got lower for each subsequent test, possibly because we were subjectively comparing each drink to the first one we tried, and so the first one became the de facto gold standard. Also, some people didn’t rinse their cups between tests. (44 plastic cups from Wal-Mart: $1.98. Accurate results on the "pop quiz": priceless)

In the end, we recommend heading to your local farmer’s market to find someone selling organic fruit syrup, and using that for your own homemade pop experiments. And Ice Java belongs with milk (or chocolate milk – yum!), not club soda. (The FS will definitely be keeping an eye open for organic fruit syrup. The raspberry & club soda combo looks yummy and refreshing)

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for the great blog post, Louisa. Come back and do another guest post anytime.

Until next week, loyal blog readers.... adieu!