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and resulted in a reduced affective response.”
    This expectations dissonance is not limited to strange foods in military labs. One afternoon, I went to visit Garrett Oliver, the stylish, urbane, and opinionated brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewery. As we sat over a few “ghost bottles” of a one-off beer aged in a bourbon barrel and containing yeast sediment from a Riesling fermentation, Oliver told me how, a few years prior, he had come up with a new limited-run beer. The brew was based on a popular cocktail called Penicillin, which blends the flavors of scotch, ginger, honey, and lemon. “It has some sourness, some sweetness,” he said. “What I loved about it was these elements all hang together to make a harmonious whole.” He wondered if he might bottle some of that same magic in a beer. And so he blended peat-smoked malt, organic lemon juice, wildflower honey, and minced ginger.
    The response was incredibly polarized. “
Draft
magazine called it one of the top twenty-five beers of 2011,” he said. “But some people wanted to punch us in the head.” The problem, he suspected, was that not every bartender was presenting it in the way Oliver had imagined. “All the bartender had to tell somebody at the end of the day was that it’s based on a cocktail that has scotch-ginger-honey-lemon. They didn’t always do it.” So some consumers drank a beer that they expected to be based on a cocktail, with maybe the original cocktail even served alongside as a cue. Others simply got, as Oliver described it, “ ‘Oh, here’s a new beer from Brooklyn Brewery, probably a pale ale or something’ that did not prepare them for this weird flavor experience. They got it in their mouth and were, like, ‘bleh.’ ” They were not told
how
to like it.
ON A SCALE FROM ONE TO NINE: THE PROBLEM OF MEASURING LIKING
    As we have seen, one messes with consumer expectation at one’s peril.
    One of the most notorious cases of taste and violated expectations is with Crystal Pepsi, the clear soft drink released by the beverage company in the early 1990s. The drink was inspired by rising sales of bottled waters and an identified trend toward “clear” products, rangingfrom dishwashing liquid to deodorant. Crystal Pepsi was positioned as a “lighter,” in both color and calorie content, more “natural” alternative to Pepsi-Cola itself. Early indications were positive. There was what the then Pepsi CEO, David Novak, described as a “hugely successful” test launch in Colorado.Three months after it was distributed nationally, Crystal Pepsi had grabbed a respectable 2.4 percent market share. It was even priced higher than Pepsi, hinting at its premium cachet.
    Then the fizz went out. By 1994, Crystal Pepsi was gone, relegated to an inglorious footnote in the history of marketing mishaps. What went wrong? Aside from the obvious—that most new products fail—there were early stirrings of discontent.A blind taste test by one newspaper hinted at the problem: People preferred the taste of Crystal Pepsi, but only when their eyes were
closed
. Seeing Crystal Pepsi created expectations of what it should taste like, and these expectations were clearly violated. Pepsi bottlers, Novak recalls, raised a different kind of expectation issue: Crystal Pepsi did not “taste enough like Pepsi.” The name Pepsi itself led consumers to believe it would be Pepsi-like. Calling it simply Crystal might have helped. But the episode raised a tricky question: If a food color’s “principal use,” as one study noted, is for “flavor identification,” what flavor are you identifying when you take the color away?
    Apart from the problem of violated expectations, the Crystal Pepsi debacle contains another important lesson: just how difficult it is to anticipate consumer liking. It seems a simple problem: If enough people like