Nice job! As usual, interesting results. Can someone please point me to a good explanation of all this p value stuff? Basically half of the people could ID and yet it is not significant?!
I am pretty sensitive to lactic acid and actually believe acid malt is superior to lactic acid. I've done the research and they are not the same. Of course, I have plenty of skeptics but that's OK. I would love to see a side by side: acid malt vs lactic acid someday...
I'm a long way removed from stats class, but in layman's terms the p value for these experiments is the odds that the results could be merely due to random guess. The lower it is, the more likely to be a significant result. They use a p value of .05, which basically amounts to a 5% chance it could be random guess or 95% confidence that the results are significant.
Remember, this is a triangle test so you'd expect 33% to be right, on average. Above that, and it is more likely to not be due to random chance. The actual calculations are where the statistics comes in, to determine how many positive results you would need from a given sample to hit a particular p value.
Great summary. I started typing a response last night and mine became so convoluted that I just discarded it
Since this one was "in the neighborhood" of significant he did include the preferences, which I also thought were interesting. Of the 11 people that successfully selected the odd beer out, only 4 selected the phosphoric acidified sample as the beer they preferred. 5 had no preference, 1 preferred the lactic sample and 1 could no longer tell the difference (not sure how that happens).