Tasting panels

I their weekly roundup Boak and Bailey had a link to a post about tasting panels with a very interesting introduction:

"trained tasters are no more likely to be accurate in a triangle test — spotting the odd one out among three beers — than anyone else"

I know from being on the tasting panel at work at there's more to it than the training. So I had a quick word with someone from our sensory department and here's the basics of how you get on the tasting panel for doing triangle tests:

• First screening: you're given couple of easy triangle tests to carry out to make sure you have a sense of taste.
  
• For Quality Assurance compliance you're then given 15 triangle tests and must score at least 60%.
  
  
• Once on the panel scores are monitored and if you drop below 50% you're dropped from the panel.

Training for beer profiling (i.e. scoring beer for different attributes) is something else, and perhaps more like the training that the trained tasters in the original post had received.