Skip to content
BrewGraphs
Menu
  • Home
  • Charts
  • Maps by Beer Type
  • Network Graphs
  • About BrewGraphs
Menu

The Search for Beer Data, Part 1

Posted on December 7, 2022 by kc2519

One of the challenges to providing interesting content for this site lies in the scarcity of interesting data sources on the beer industry, especially at the craft beer level. There is certainly data in the beer universe (think Untappd, Beer Advocate, BreweryDB, etc.) but not a lot that is accessible via API or traditional databases. My other sites have it good – Visual-Baseball currently uses three great data sources (Baseball-Databank, Retrosheet, and Neil Paine’s 538 github site), JazzGraphs has the colossal MusicBrainz database available for exploration, and Visual-Detroit gets to choose from sources as varied as SEDA and the Detroit Open Data Portal for starters.

In short, I’m constantly on the lookout for publicly available beer data to create interesting visual stories. Therefore, I was encouraged when I stumbled across the Beer Maverick site today; not only is it a great resource for homebrewers, craft beer drinkers, and other beer industry followers, but it is also visually driven. While there is no publicly available API at this stage, I’m hopeful that will change, and in the meantime I should be able to pull together some interesting content based on their data.

Here’s an example from a page on their site, featuring the great Strata hop, one of my personal favorites:

A radar plot showing the attributes of the Strata hop

Note the smart use of a radar plot (normally not a favorite of mine) to display the aroma and flavor footprint of this hop variety.

Here’s another example showing their use of simple yet clean and informative graphics to deliver insights on this variety of hop:

Brewing values for the Strata hop

These are obviously technical terms that perhaps only resonate with brewers; what I love are the concise displays and context for how Strata compares to other hops. This is a wonderful evocation of Edward Tufte’s data:ink ratio; a lot of information is delivered using a minimal amount of ink (or pixels, in this case). There are additional attributes displayed, as well as sections on which other hops can be substituted or are compatible with Strata.

To summarize, I’m hoping to leverage data from the site to create some interesting visualizations – think of a hop network which displays each hop as a node and positions it relative to other hops. There are more than 300 hops on the Beer Maverick site, as well as > 500 strains of yeast; I think either would make for a very interesting network graph. And maybe I can talk to the Beer Maverick folks about getting access to an API for this purpose :). In the meantime, I’ll play with some small datasets to create some interesting content around the craft beer world.

That’s it for now, and thanks for reading!

  • beer
  • Beer Maverick
  • hops
  • yeast
  • Leave a Reply Cancel reply

    Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

    Tags

    Arclight beer Beer Maverick beer types Bell's breweries Brewers Friend BreweryDB brewing charts color ColorZilla comments data visualization data wrangling double ipa Exploratory Founders Gephi glassware glassware styles GraphiQL hops imperial stout json Mapbox mapping mead Narke Kaggen network graphs quadrupel RateBeer sentiment analysis sigma.js SRM styles text mining top beers Toppling Goliath Two Hearted yeast

    Recent Posts

    • Hops Network Using Flourish
    • Hop Network, Part 2
    • Developing a Hop Network
    • The Search for Beer Data, Part 1
    • Beer Types and Glassware Styles, Part 3

    Visit My Other Sites

    Visual-Baseball

    Visualidity

    JazzGraphs

    Recent Comments

      Archives

      • February 2023
      • December 2022
      • March 2020
      • February 2020
      • April 2019
      • March 2019
      • December 2018
      • November 2018

      Categories

      • beer
      • data analysis
      • data visualization
      • general
      • mapping
      • Uncategorized

      Meta

      • Log in
      • Entries feed
      • Comments feed
      • WordPress.org
      © 2023 BrewGraphs | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme
      Scroll Up