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 […]
Category: Analysis
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
How in the world did I come up with a juniper berry gose? Is a Chai Saison actually good? A Hazelnut Belgian Tripel? How does this site work? Great questions. Here’s a bit of what goes on behind the scenes on this site. First, What to Brew collects a ton of data. Through our website […]
In the world of beer, there are some styles that work with just about anything. They’re the Kevin Bacon or Samuel L. Jackson of beers. Based on over 50,000 votes on What to Brew, here are the top 4 most flexible beers. 4. Blonde Ale, 57% good votes This is a balanced brew, so no big […]
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