Cloudwater reveal Taco/Cat experiment results

I assume many of us tried Cloudwater's recent experimental brews Taco and Cat - identically brewed beers except for one key difference. They've finally posted on their blog a fairly long article on it:
http://cloudwaterbrew.co/blog/taco-versus-cat

The difference was simply the source of the hops (US sourced vs UK sourced).

Purpose of the experiment was that Cloudwater discovered they brew their DIPAs in almost identical ways to US brewers, but wondered why the hoppy DIPAs brewed in the US with hop rates as low as 15g/L are just as impactful as their own which need a much higher rate of 25g/L. With the help of The Veil they were able to brew a split batch IPA identical in every way except the source of the hops. Taco using US, Cat using UK.

Taco was dry hopped with US sourced hops that The Veil air freighted over, and Cat with UK sourced hops, both sourced from the same parent company. Of course the differences between the two beers could be simply down to variations between the two batches as far back as soil conditions, micro climate, harvest time, drying and processing methods at the respective farms, any minor storage differences at the pellet plant (such as hop bale arrival temperature), or indeed any differences in transportation environments as the pellets made their way over land to Richmond, Virginia to sit in The Veil’s cold store, or over land, and sea, for the UK sourced pellets to be warehoused in the UK before we took delivery of them into our hop store.

Taking part in hop selection this year was the most eye opening experience I’ve had regarding hop quality variation. Adjacent farms with seemingly minor differences in growing, picking, and processing preferences scored anywhere between class leading and poor, so I’m far from being able to draw any reliable conclusions this year.

Interesting!

think they needed to be very careful not to piss off supplier. but think a fascinating experiment

Something I forgot to add to the first post. Did RateBeer users agree with the majority?

Not really, no! In fact it's so close there's just 0.01 in it in favour of Cat at the time of posting (though curiously it has 4 fewer ratings)
Taco - https://www.ratebeer.com/beer/cloudwater-the-veil-taco/552770/ - 25 ratings with a mean of 3.84
Cat - https://www.ratebeer.com/beer/cloudwater-the-veil-cat/552771/ - 21 ratings with a mean of 3.85

Purely for reference/comparison, the scores from UT checkins are currently:
Taco - 664 ratings with a mean of 4.14
Cat - 685 ratings with a mean of 4.03

Considering how close the scores are from both sites it strikes me as slightly odd that a majority of respondents decidedly prefered Taco, yet RB ratings and UT checkins put both beers extremely close with one another.

Yes, but that's assuming people had both beers. If some raters only got hold of 1 of the 2 that would account for the difference

I personally preferred the taco (4.0 to 3.8).

The difference wasn’t where the hops were grown. The hops were from the same US supplier. The difference was the supply chain. One batch was sent to Veil and air freighted to CW. The other was CW’s normal channel.

I gave Taco a 3.9 and Cat a 4.0. So for me there was no marked difference.

Originally posted by The_Osprey
Yes, but that's assuming people had both beers. If some raters only got hold of 1 of the 2 that would account for the difference

Originally posted by Garrold
The difference wasn’t where the hops were grown. The hops were from the same US supplier. The difference was the supply chain. One batch was sent to Veil and air freighted to CW. The other was CW’s normal channel.

I proffered cat.