XKCD is the best-tasting webcomic, with a penchant for data-driven comics that are both funny and informative. So I was excited to see this recent comic, showing the best-tasting colors. I quickly realized that I had, at my fingertips, a dataset that could corroborate this comic. The What to Brew dataset has roughly 118,000 datapoints of […]
Imagine a graph. The X-axis is hoppiness and the Y-axis is maltiness. Graphing styles on this graph would be useful- you could visualize that American Barleywine and English Barleywine are both hoppy, but that American Barleywine is also more hoppy. You could also see that some styles would cluster together – an American Amber Ale and […]
Last year, the BJCP released a new set of beer style guidelines that regrouped and reclassified the world of beer into styles and categories. This was based on a lot of hard work by some very smart people. So of course, I wanted to see how a computer could compare. For this exercise, I am using […]
There are currently well over 100,000 votes on What to Brew, meaning it’s a treasure trove of data. But data is only as useful as its analysis. This article looks at my work to find groupings of similar homebrew additions based on how well they work with each style. I decided to use k-means clustering to […]
It seemed a bit odd, I agree, but I had a homebrewed gose in one hand, and some fresh watermelon juice in the other. I dumped a bit of the watermelon juice in the gose, and took a hesitant sip. My eyes got big, and I knew I had a winner with watermelon gose. Since then, […]
The rhubarb saison was the combination of 2 things I very much love. Rhubarb takes me back to my grandma’s table, where early summer meant strawberry rhubarb jello. I later was introduced to rhubarb sauce, which is essentially rhubarb and sugar cooked down. Served over ice cream, it introduced me to rhubarb without strawberries. The […]
I’m happy to introduce a new way of exploring data on the What to Brew site- style tags. This allows you to see how similar styles of beers work with specific additions. Style tags In the BJCP 2015 Style Guidelines, the authors added a list of helpful tags to each style. In contrast to the […]
One of my all time favorite beers is Dry Dock’s Apricot Blonde. I had the chance to try it out back when Dry Dock was 800 square feet tacked on to a homebrew shop. It was an early beer that convinced me that additions to beer could be done well- balanced, tasty, and not too sweet. […]
American IPA is a mixed bag when it comes to adding things beyond hops- there are some additions that work pretty well, and some that don’t work very well at all. Fruit additions Fruit seems to be the strongest categories of additions. Additions like cherry, orange peel, and lemon peel would pair well with the citrus […]
You may have noticed, while perusing the rankings of different additions, a small section called “Similar Additions”. This is a pretty fun feature that adds a lot of possibilities. How it works This is the boring part, unless you love data. Basically, I wrote a script that goes through each addition, and compares how it’s rated […]
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