Development and Validation of a Consumer-Oriented Sensory Evaluation Scale for Pale Lager Beer.

Pale lager dominates global beer markets. However, rising living standards and changing consumer expectations have reshaped sensory preferences, highlighting the importance of understanding consumers' true sensory priorities. In this study, a twenty-eight-item questionnaire, refined through multiple rounds of optimization, was distributed across China and yielded 1837 valid responses. Spearman correlation analysis and partial least-squares regressions showed that educational background and spending willingness exerted the strongest independent effects on sensory priorities. A hybrid analytic hierarchy process-entropy weight method-Delphi procedure was then applied to quantify sensory attribute importance. Results indicated that drinking sensation (30.92%) emerged as the leading driver of pale lager choice, followed by taste (26.60%), aroma (24.77%), and appearance (17.71%), confirming a flavor-led and experience-oriented preference structure. Weighting patterns differed across drinking-frequency cohorts: consumers moved from reliance on overall mouthfeel, through heightened sensitivity to negative attributes, to an eventual focus on subtle hedonic details. Based on these findings, a new sensory evaluation scale was developed and validated against consumer preference rankings, showing significantly stronger alignment with consumer preferences (ρ = 0.800; τ = 0.667) than the traditional scale. The findings supply actionable metrics and decision tools for breweries, supporting applications in product development, quality monitoring, and targeted marketing.