Chapter 1 Introduction

Beer is an everyday drink that we are all familiar with, the classic impression of a beer such as Heineken and Budweiser is that it has a light body, a refreshing and slightly bitter taste. We believe all of us share a similar experience where we tried a sip of beer for the first time and only got disappointed by it. Every since that trauma, the question would automatically pop up whenever we see other people consume beer with delight, why would people love it? Beer is normally portrayed as a cheap, easy to access, and down to the earth type of beverage, it never received the attention that wine has been enjoying in the past decades. Both of us felt the same way when we first started drinking beer it’s more of a way to get you into the party mood and sometimes we would drink for effect rather than the taste. That changed about 5 years ago when we first got exposed to craft beer and we fell in love with it immediately, and our craft beer journey started. Before we dive into the investigation of the craft beer, let us get the definition of craft beer out of the way first. Craft beer is defined as a beer made by a brewer that is small, independent, and traditional. According to the Brewers Association (BA), an industry group of mostly small, independent brewers, there are more than 8,000 craft breweries in the U.S. Nearly 4,000 of them opened between 2015–2020. With steady growth in craft beer community, craft brewers started organizing beer festivals and making craft beers available at multiple locations, that’s when people got to try different styles of beers and this changed our perception altogether.

Since a few years ago, a few online websites and phone apps were developed for people to share their experience and knowledge about craft beers. Specifically, there are a few well-known beer websites that motivate social drinking such as Untappd and BeerAdvocate (similar to IMDB), where people could find the information on beers, give their own ratings to the beers and also leave comments, and this actually generated a lot of valuable data. For example, the beer apps could leverage this data for developing beer recommendation systems and predict what is going to be the next popular beer? Despite the data is being collected by those organizations and companies, this data is still publicly available on their websites or through their own API endpoint.

As we both are craft beer enthusiasts and on a mission of drinking the best craft beers in the US. Due to the sheer large number of breweries and beers available nowadays, it would be impossible to try every one of them, therefore we would have to apply some data-driven approach to help us identify good beers more efficiently. Although “what is a good beer” is a highly subjective question, there is some census among the beer geeks in terms of what beer styles are preferred and what beers tend to get higher ratings.

We have been wanting to conduct some beer analyses to understand the landscape of the craft beer industry. Doing so will allow us better understand our own tastes, and enable us to apply a data-driven approach for beer hunting. And this final project gives us an opportunity to do just that. In this project, we are going to apply the EDAV techniques to the beer rating data (will be discussed later in the data source section) in conjunction with our beer knowledge hopefully, we will gain some new insights that we didn’t previously know. Specifically, we decided to analyze the beer styles, beer characteristics, regional origins, and the corresponding ratings given out by users. We have designed a few starter questions to get us started shown below, however, as we dive into the data deeper, the questions will definitely go beyond the scope defined here in the later chapters.

To formulate the starter questions,

  1. Where are the breweries located across the US? Which of the states have the most breweries?

  2. Is there any correlation between the region of the brewery and the user rating?

  3. Do different states tend to brew certain beer styles?

  4. Is there a correlation between beer styles and user ratings? Do certain beer styles tend to be rated higher than other styles?

  5. What traits of the beers tend to receive higher ratings?