Tea Drinkers Don't Like Whisky

I recently asked my Facebook friends to rate the following beverages in order of preference: coffee, beer, tea, wine, whisky. I had started with a hypothesis (which I did not reveal because that would have skewed my data!), but the answers - even apart from whether they bore it out – proved to be interesting.

They are also statistically meaningless. The sample size, 57, was too small and in no way random. My FB friends, I suspect, are older, better educated and fitter than the population at large. (Also more clever, attractive and ethical – these are my friends, after all.)

    That said, I will now make like a real professor and derive all sorts of truth from my results.

First of all, coffee is easily the world’s favorite beverage – selected No. 1 by 32 respondents (56 percent), and No. 2 by an additional seven.

Next up is tea, chosen first by nine people (16 percent), and second by an additional 11.

Beer was chosen first by five respondents, wine by three, and whisky by one – hey, Cousin Phil!

As for my hypothesis – here it is: People who like whisky also like coffee and probably do not like tea. My idea was that there are two kinds of people, those who like strong stimuli and those who don’t. Thus, if you seek a powerful caffeine jolt, you also seek a powerful alcohol jolt. (Also, coffee and whisky in general hit the tastebuds harder than tea and, say, beer.)

Did the results bear out my hypothesis? Mostly. 

Of the 12 people who chose whisky as third or higher, nine ranked coffee first – or, in the case of Cousin Phil, coffee second. Sadly, the three who did not rank coffee first undercut the hypothesis by picking tea as their No. 1. Mere outliers? Statistically significant? Or maybe they drink really really strong tea.

Thanks to the chattiness of my Facebook friends, my study also incorporates a qualitative component, which I mention because it buttresses the hypothesis. In other words, two tea lovers made comments about whisky: “You can keep it,” and “One time in my life and never again.”

Another tea drinker made a similar comment about coffee, “I can’t stand even a sip.”

All in all, my study – while almost certainly sufficient to get me a PhD and possibly a Macarthur – raises more questions than it answers. What if I had specified black coffee? What if I had specified red wine? What if I had specified Scotch or bourbon?

As is always the case in academe, more research is needed.