Ollie Seltzers Tasting @ Ziggy Zaggy's 13th June

The most rocking bar in Kampong Bugis hosted our June meet-up with 18 taps of crafted beverages and American fusion makan. Taking on a slightly different spin this time, we had Sam from Ollie Seltzers on board to give us the low down on this sparkling refreshing drink with hints and tips for brewing the best seltzer at home!

Ziggy Zagg’s Towkay, whom many will know as the affable Ngak, gave interested members a tour of the operations, and especially boggled our 10pm beer and seltzers induced minds on how the taps are set up behind the wall….

And for good measure, proving that beer can raise the human mind to a higher state of consciousness and clarity, our new member David ( Who is an expert in Applied Statistics and Data Science) shared that we had gathered on a very important day as 13th June is globally known as “Statistics and Beer Day”.

Did you know that Beer had a significant contribution to the field of Statistics, particularly to the Student t-distribution? Here are the facts:

June 13th is the birthday of William Sealy Gosset, best known for developing the Student’s T-Distribution. This development came out of his work as head brewer of Guinness in the early 1900s. In order to improve the reliability of beer batches, he used small samples to do tests, but there were no small-sample statistics at the time. So he developed such small-sample statistics, including the Student’s T-Distribution, which describes the distances of a sample mean (small sample) and the population mean. For instance if you took 5 samples from 5 barrels and found that the alcohol content was on average lower than you expected, that could either mean that something had gone wrong with the brewing, or simply that any small sample will deviate from population due to randomness. The T-distribution allowed him to check. His work is now widely used across all sciences (e.g. the T-Test). The name “Student” distribution is often thought to have something to do with school students. Actually Student (always capitalised) is the pen-name that William Sealy Gosset published under, as Guinness forbade the publishing under real names, in order to avoid sharing trade secrets.

Lastly, a big thank you to Ngak for hosting and drinking with us. Here’s a toast to Ngak’s kid!