John Cook’s theory of why the t distribution was discovered at a brewery:
Beer makers pride themselves on consistency while wine makers pride themselves on variety. That’s why you’ll never hear beer fans talk about a “good year” the way wine connoisseurs do. Because they value consistency, beer makers invest more in extensive statistical quality control than wine makers do.
(On the other hand, Seth thinks that “ditto foods” are so late-twentieth-century, and that lack of uniformity in taste is ultimately healthier.)
Inference from an outlier?
Name another famous brewery statistician or result that came out of a brewery employee other than Gosset? I am not saying they don't exist. I could be an ignorant louse! It seems like there should be two mentioned before we go deciding why statistical results are more often generated from the beer industry.
Which raises the question was agriculture inevitably destined to give rise to ANOVA or was it the marginal influence of R.A. Fisher that sent the world down the most important scientific path of the 20th century?
I just ask because agriculture has shown itself to be a ripe landscape to explore these design of experiment topics. The post-ANOVA literature is ripe with "agriculture station" type locations. There is a natural fit between using land and basic experimental design that is easily visualized.
So was it Fisher being in the right place at the right time or was it something more fundamental about the forward push of intellectual thought?
Such a wide-open topic for debate… but in short, the biggest factor is almost certainly that the biggest breweries are much, much bigger than the biggest wineries. One consequence is that they can afford to send their scientists back to school to fine-tune their statistical methodology, as Guinness did with Gosset in 1906.
Working with Pearson Sr. almost certainly had something to do with the eventual success of the paper.
I can say one thing for beer never mind which bottle you open the taste stays the same unlike wine.
in my article "nectar of the slums" (http://www.theog.org) I have covered some of the advantages in beer over other types of alcohol, in addition the history of beer in my eyes is much more interesting.
If consisntency were the key, one would think that the dairies would be more prominent in the statistician list. Nobody wants milk to taste any different, or values a particular bouquet.
I think Andrew C. Thomas is right in terms of size. Large companies can afford to research more obscure areas. Even in 1906, breweries had scale. Dairies did not, at that time.
Another area we might look at is package engineering. Beer and soft drink packaging is clearly more innovative than wine packaging. Only recently (after industry consolidation) has dairy packaging begun to get creative.
I recall an article in Scientific American about aluminum can design by somebody at a large beer company some years ago. Beer and soda companies spend many millions on packaging materials and can justify experts to research how to save money on packaging components.
Not much packagin innovation in wine; what there is has mostly come out of the large American companies that have some scale.