And now my current W-34/70 lager tastes fruity because I was dumb enough to ferment it at 65 F because Brulosophy has proven numerous times that people can't tell the difference -- well I can. So yeah... stuff can happen.
Bless those folks that do these trials, but I do question their results due to exactly this point. Untrained and insensitive drinkers that probably only can tell that its 'beer', aren't well suited to discerning the minor impacts that those testing trials impart on the beer. In addition, without training and sensitizing, most drinkers would overlook these minor flaws that the trials MIGHT have produced.
My understanding of proper flavor testing by major breweries and testing services (like Siebel), is that they train and sensitize their tasting panels to recognize the flaw characteristics before the conduct their blind triangle testing series. In my opinion, the trials done by the homebrewer groups are innately flawed because of this lack of training.
Again, I commend those homebrew groups for their efforts, but they do need to improve their assessment methods in order to make any of their results worth anything.