Will he be expectorating or imbibing?

Now there's a shockingly inappropriate question! 

My willingness to take this bet is dependent on how inebriated CO2 could potentially get. I might also try and manipulate things by chucking what he doesn't drink, mortally offending him and causing him to drink to completion.

Now, outside of CO2, I suspect you take the average craft beer fan and they wouldn't be able to tell them apart to save their life.

Heck, I suspect that if you slapped a "FishHead Brewery - Summer Moon River Woods Bright Lager" label on some OB or whatever and 80% of these craft beer yahoos would drink it down no problem.

And if people think they wouldn't be susceptible to this, they have zero clue how perception works. Unless you're like 24-7 in on tasting things, you aren't going to be able to tell.

I think you're overstating things a bit for dramatic effect, but I agree with the gist of it. I think this applies to a *lot* of things though.
Did you know that a surprising percentage of people, when blindfolded and nose-plugged, can't consistently differentiate between a slice of raw apple and a slice of raw potato? This is true even without being covid infected!
https://culinarylore.com/food-science:apples-potatoes-and-smell-experiment/

Anyway, stuff like this just goes to show how effective branding is in making the average person think that identical crap is completely different.

Well, yes, that's def true.

But most people don't realize just how inextricably linked they actually are, and how flavours that we normally perceive to be completely different are, well, not.
Perceived differences and similarities are as often as not just mental constructs. Sometimes the difference between a fine liquor, and that puddle that's been slowly eating away the varnish on the bar counter is nothing more than a label and a word.

And all of this completely discounts how the perception of flavours can vary wildly from individual to individual. Many receptors for specific flavours and scents rely on very specific genes that aren't expressed equally among populations. Popular examples of this include the ones that dominate the flavours for broccoli and cilantro. The world you smell might be entirely unique to you.
    The same is true for all your senses, really. The relative sensitivity of cones in the human eye vary greatly even among people with "normal" colour vision. Different tones will "pop" more for some than for others. Heck, this completely discounts the fact that while most of us have 3 different types of colour sensitive cones in our retina, some people have 4, while a very, very few have 5 and can see distinctions in tones that the rest of us poor plebs never will.

In a sense (pun), we all live in our very own Plato's cave, watching very different shadows.
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Anyway, all of this is really just a long lead up to why gouda is superior in every way to both processed cheese slices *and* cheddar, and everybody who disagrees with that does so due to the suboptimal expression of their olfactory related genes.