Recently, hard seltzers have dethroned beer as the drink of choice for parties. They can be good and I believe more well received on average, due to taste and lower caloric content, being mainly just water, vodka, and flavouring. So here I go, casting my opinion nobody asked for into the great ether :fishing_pole_and_fish:

The results were gathered at a house party hosted by my friend @yelli_r on Aug 28, 2021 and it was all around good vibes. It was refreshing as well because unlike the beer tasting night, most of the flavours were not the classics, e.g. Whiteclaw.

Here are my conclusions, based purely on taste :yum:

Tier Seltzers        
S Alani Mimosa Smirnoff Ice Smash Red, White & Berry      
A Alani Peach, Please Truly Strawberry Lemonade Alani Hawaiian Shaved Iced Seven Peaks Raspberry Cosmo Sun Smash Prickly Pear Lime
B Seven Peaks Tropical Smash Waveline Huckleberry Suzie’s Moscow Mule Quirk Pear + Yuzu  
C Quirk Hibiscus Lemonade Barefoot Peach & Nectarine Day Fade Black Cherry Quirk Watermelon Salt & Lime  
D Cacti Lime Agave Green House Cucumber Basil      

S is the best, each column is also ordered by how much I like. i.e. Waveline Huckleberry > Quirk Pear Yuzu.
To view this table as an image that I made on Tier Maker the night of click here

Party Consensus

Now! I don’t only have my own rankings for the seltzers. Everyone was writing down their scores on the same piece of paper using a scale of 1 to 5, although some had a more creative scoring strategy, looking at you Alston! :joy:

At some point in the party, I snapped pictures of these data sheets and afterwards created this spreadsheet. Unfortunately, it probably wasn’t at the end of the party so it may have been updated afterwards and also the photo chopped off some rows of scores… but hey, can you blame a guy who’s had a 17 drink medley in the name of science?! At least I have my own answers for every seltzer, does that speak more to my completionist attitude or drinking aptitude, I’ll let you decide :balance_scale:

Note: I clamped all scores between 0 and 5, leaving the original as a comment on the cell

Time to crunch the numbies and draw some interesting conclusions :nerd_face:

Here’s how the seltzers rank by Average Score. Keep in mind that flavours were not scored by equal amounts of people, those with less than a few Samples should be taken with a grain of salt. Finally, the Std Dev can be used to gauge how polarizing a seltzer is among our boozers, lower value means people generally agree on the average, whereas a higher value indicates disagreement.

Table of seltzers and scores

Some insights we can gather from this table

  • Truly Strawberry Lemonade and Smirnoff Smash Red, White & Berry both score around 4 stars with 9 samples each. Humans love glucose :candy:
  • Everyone agrees that Day Fade Black Cherry should be discontinued immediately. It scored lowest, by 12 people, and also had the smallest Std Dev.
  • Green House Cucumber Basil is very polarizing, with 6 scores, half were 1 star or less, and half were 4 stars or more, nothing between.

Post Script

I still think that a banana flavoured hard seltzer would be an absolute slam dunk and am disappointed no one’s crafted it thus far, that isn’t the NELK Boys.

Something I’d also like to calculate is how far away from the Std Dev on average each person’s scores are. Let me know if you are a Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel wizard and can share with me the function for this metric :crystal_ball:

Looking forward to the next tasting and tier list creation! Ciders perhaps? :apple: