For much of my time at Caltech, a bunch of friends and I had a Friday-afternoon drinking group*. I have many fond memories of "Beerhour", from getting a bottle-cap laurel wreath as I was elected Beer-lemagne to when we brought out the Moveable Feast to ride around campus and pester the attendants of TEDxCaltech.
Heady times at Beerhour.
And, of course, trying a wide variety of beers.
Sadly, the only recording I had ever done of my
beer-drinking habits was a double-blind
taste test with some of my department peers on a variety of cheap
beers. While this was, in fact, a properly conducted experiment and I can now without shame embrace inner hipster when drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, for
the most part I could hardly remember what I'd tried and
liked.
Around August, I realized this simply would not do, and I started keeping a small notebook with me to record all the beers I tried. I subsequently purchased a Raspberry Pi and had some rather grand ideas of turning it into a beer database until I realized it was far easier just to stick things into a spreadsheet on my computer and go from there.**
All beers were rated from 0 to 10, with the hope that these rather subjective ratings would generally average out to something useful. Notes were kept on the taste and mouthfeel, and other pertinent information. But collecting reviews was just the start; how does this let me know what other beers I might like? What sorts of beer-wisdom really holds true for me? And so I started to play around and see what sort of greater knowledge I could glean.
For the most part, I set up a system that just gives me averages, standard deviations, and the minimums and maximums for various conditions. I even took some t-tests to compare different classes of beer, which seems entirely appropriate even though I'm hardly getting a random sample: Outside of Switzerland (and whatever I picked up in the US) for this data I really didn't have access to the FULL range of beers, just whatever various companies think is worth importing across borders (viz, none of the really bad supermarket beer, nor anything really small-batch). Mostly I just went to Drinks of the World and would pick up things I hadn't rated before, hoping this would give a roughly representative sample. And unlike the cheap-beer taste test, this is also not remotely double-blind. Nor single-blind. Nor blind drunk. Nor methanol blind (thank goodness).
Still, I tried to have the beers in a fairly consistent fashion; drinking them when they're fairly cool (not cold!) and straight from the bottle or can (because I like to make my German friends cringe). I usually drank with little taste in my mouth (but not always) and tried to keep myself sober. I did record things like temperature and drinking situation with the eventual hope that it would let me "adjust" the ratings at some point, though that's a project for later.
So, here's the data so far:
