General Results

I’m going to try to start broad and move to increasing levels of abstraction for these results. Meat was rated on a 1-10 scale where 10 was the best possible score. Here’s a chart of the mean score of each place along with standard deviation lines, which serve as a hint of what’s to come.

Sausage

Here’s a chart of some basic numerical breakdowns of the data behind this:

Snow’s La BBQ Kreuz Micklethwait Mean 6.72 6.94 3.72 6.056 Mode 7 9 1 7 Median 7 7 3.5 7 Min 5 3 1 1 Max 9 9 9 9 SDEV 1.23 1.89 2.56 2.01

Verdict – It’s basically a statistical tie between La BBQ and Snow’s

Brisket

And a chart full of numbers:

Snow’s John Mueller Rudy’s Louie Mueller Mickle-thwait Smitty’s Brown’s La BBQ Mean 6.42 4.11 5.48 6.30 7.22 4.70 8.18 7.74 Mode 7 3 6 9 7 5 10 8 Median 7 3 6 7.5 7 5 9 8 Min 2 1 1 1 2 1 5 1 Max 9 10 10 10 10 8 10 10 SDEV 1.92 2.50 2.10 3.16 1.89 2.20 1.85 2.05

Observations

A few interesting items jump out when you look at this data. I’ll start with the sausage.

No one thought any of these sausages was a perfect 10 but every sausage was given a 9/10 by at least one person

Micklethwait and Kreuz were both rated ‘1’ by at least one person (and Kreuz was actually rated a 1 by 5 of the 30 votes cast)

A lot people liked Snow’s and La BBQ and our sample isn’t large enough to have a definitive winner. More people loved La BBQ, getting it 5 “9” ratings compared to just 2 for Snow’s but Snow’s lowest rating was a 5, compared to La BBQ’s lowest rating of 3. This makes a lot of sense when you compare Snow’s SDev of 1.23 to La BBQ’s of 1.89. Conclusion: almost everyone in your party will think that Snow’s sausage is at or above average but La BBQ will have a higher opinion, on average, despite being slightly more polarized.

Both of these options have both a higher mean score and a lower standard deviation than their competitors, meaning they will be liked better and more consistently than Kreuz or Micklethwait.

Now, onto the brisket:

John Mueller Meat Co. was a surprise upset and came in dead last when many expected it to be among the top. Many people had high expectations and couldn’t believe it when they found out which brisket came from John Mueller. Anecdotally, I and most people who disliked it found it disappointingly dry

With the exception of Smitty’s (with a top score of 8) and Snow’s (top score of 9), every single place we tried was rated a “10” by at least one person, including Rudy’s

Save yourself a trip to Lockhart by getting Rudy’s BBQ, which received an average score of almost 0.8 points more than Smitty’s

Each place was hated (rated a 1) by at least 1 person except for Snow’s, Micklethwait (lowest score of 2 for each), and Brown’s (lowest score of 5)

Brown’s not only received the highest average scores but also featured the lowest standard deviation and the best low rating. No one hated it, it received more 10’s than any other brisket, and it had the highest median score. When you consider all of this, I think that Brown’s appears to have a pretty solid win under its belt. La BBQ is a solid second and Micklethwait a solid third.

Additionally, one participant took issue with the results and said that what really matters is which place scored the highest for each individual rater. This analysis results in even starker results, 15 people rated Brown’s the highest, 8 for La BBQ, and 5 each for Louie Mueller and Micklethwait.

Verdict – At first glance, it seemed like Brown’s and La BBQ were pretty close to tied but the more measures I looked at, the further away Brown’s pulled. I think that Brown’s is the definitive winner, followed by La BBQ.

Experimental Questions

What difference does being Texan make?

We asked everyone rating the BBQ to tell us whether or not they’re native Texans

Do Texans and non-Texans rate BBQ differently? Yes. At least with brisket, but only a little. Both groups rate sausages about the same but having your brisket eaten by a non-Texan get you about a half a point extra on your ratings. Maybe Texans are harsher critics of their native dish?

Were you born in Texas? Average Sausage Score Average Brisket Scores No 5.84375 5.899147727 Yes 5.875 5.406304188

Here’s a breakdown of how Texans and non-Texans rate individual restaurants. This data has been corrected for the higher average scores that non-Texans give. Positive scores indicate a preference by Texans, negative scores indicate a preference by people not born in Texas. All of our tasters have lived in Texas for at least the past 3 years.

This data is really fascinating. The places that did the best overall (Brown’s, La BBQ, Micklethwait) are also the ones that tend to be preferred the most by native Texans.

I also broke the data out by whether people came from a Rural/Suburban/Urban hometown and I’m not sure there’s much interesting info to garner from it, but here are the results: