Women: Is There Anything They Can’t Do Better Than Us?

duffThere are few things more male in this world than beer. Why, just ask men—they’ll tell you. But it turns out, according to the Wall Street Journal, that women are better at tasting beer than men are:

[T]he British company SABMiller PLC decided several years ago to reach deeper into its employee pool to find adept tasters, inviting marketers, secretaries and others to try their hand. The company concluded that women were drinking men under the table.

“We have found that females often are more sensitive about the levels of flavor in beer,” says Barry Axcell, SABMiller’s chief brewer. Women trained as tasters outshine their male counterparts, he says.

So, great. Fucking wonderful. Thousands of years of dominating the alcholic refreshment world, and now it turns out women know our drinks better than we know them ourselves.

But! There is an upside. It turns out that women who taste beer well don’t necessarily enjoy drinking it more, nor do their friends enjoy drinking around them:

“It’s hard to be a social drinker sometimes,” says Laura Dopkins, 28, a MillerCoors panelist, who has a master’s degree in food science and used to taste cereal bars for Kellogg Co. “Other people don’t find it fun to drink around you” when you refer to beer as “metallic.”

What that means is that while women may be better at tasting beer, men are still better at enjoying it—even if that means we’ll put up with metallic, skunky beer.

Although, actually, we may not have to. Since women are supposedly “the superior sex when it comes to detecting such undesirable chemicals as 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol, which makes beer ‘skunky,'” we can continue to employ them (at home and unofficially, of course) as quality control, like the dupes who taste Obama’s food for poison. Honey, can you get me another? This one tastes … funny.

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About Matt

Matt Gross writes about travel and food for the New York Times, Saveur, Gourmet, and Afar, where he is a Contributing Writer. When he’s not on the road, he’s with his wife, Jean, and daughter, Sasha, in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

2 thoughts on “Women: Is There Anything They Can’t Do Better Than Us?

  1. Sounds like balls tome. There’s not much woment can do better. If anything. Maybe sandwiches?

  2. Pingback: The Week on the Wagon: Women Edition | DADWAGON

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