Author: James

Sorry, XKCD, pink is not the best-tasting color

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 […]

When algorithms drink beer

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 […]

Homebrew addition clustering

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 […]

Watermelon Gose

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, […]

Rhubarb Saison

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 […]

American IPA Homebrew Additions

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 […]

What are “Similar Additions”?

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 […]