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:
General ratings:
How consistently do I rate drinks? I'd expect my ratings to roughly look "normal" with most beers being average and a few highlights and some that are real dogs. Some weeks in, I eventually settled upon a threshold: a rating of 6 or higher meant that I considered the beer worth finishing, and for 5 and below I'd be willing to toss. Hopefully deciding on the threshold would not skew things too much.
Fortunately, it looks like, 200 beers in I've managed to keep my ratings fairly normal, though there's a slight paucity of "5" ratings. I might be somewhat emphasizing "6" ratings over "5"s, but this is something we can work with.
Ale versus Lager:
The classic dichotomy of the beer world, you've either got your top-fermenting ales or your bottom-fermenting lagers; Warm versus cold fermenting, the Isles and Low Country versus Mitteleurope.
Surprisingly, for such a fundamental division of beer, it took a bit of digging to actually be able to classify things like what a Zwickelbier is (Lager) or a Flanders Oud Bruin (Ale). You'd think one could find a full taxonomy of beers with a few seconds on the Internet, but this actually took some time to sort out and I wouldn't be surprised if there's a mistake. Oh well.
With that said, starting out and not having a great understanding of the classification I had a feeling that lagers would rate slightly higher; mostly as I had some fond memories of bock beers and my initial thoughts about ales were IPAs, many of which I find too hoppy. Probably not that much of a difference.
The distinction between the two types of beer is pretty clear; ales are a clear winner, with a two-sided p-score of 7.53E-8 and a difference of over a full point between the two styles. The two samples are also relatively normal-shaped, which makes me feel a bit more confident.
Note that I haven't tried any ciders yet, but that's an upcoming plan. There is also one beer in the set (a spiced beer) of unknown Ale/Lager providence, so the count doesn't quite sum to 200.
Looking at the actual various beer styles, we get:
This is only keeping styles where I've had more than one beer in each style. Bars indicate the standard deviation.
The sour beers (Biere de Garde, Gueze, and the Flanders beers) are definite winners, while the pale lagers and pilsners definite losers. I'm surprised that Doppelbock rates so slowly, given all the fond memories I have of Shiner Bock. More study required, apparently.
Which countries make the best beer?
Here we begin some real geopolitics and also some small-number statistics--ultimately only a few countries currently have more than 10 ratings, and several where I only have 4-8 (and cannot buy any more from Drinks of the World). So accepting that some of these results probably have some truly wide confidence intervals:
The 5 countries with the most ratings. A bit of a mess, but at least things look somewhat normal.
I'm dropping all countries where I have less than 3 ratings for this table.
The clear winner here in Belgium. Their reputation is well deserved, and as the primary source of sour beers they get a real boost. Surprisingly, their Low Country neighbor the Netherlands does really, really poorly. This may be partially due to the fact that their export beers are generally Heineken or SABMiller brands (more below) but there were zero highlights of the beers I tried.
The Czech Republic was also surprisingly disappointing, given their status as a beer powerhouse. Rob Pattinson of European Beer Guide noted that things have been going downhill there lately, and I'd be inclined to believe him. And for all their fancy fermented milk, the Swiss have little to offer in good fermented grains. Sadly, recent anti-EU votes probably will do little to attract in more German brewers.
Germany, for its reputation, is pretty evenly rated with the United States and Canada and the three countries rating averages tended to bob up and down relative to each other as I was collecting reviews. At least they didn't do worse, as there is a fair degree of criticism for the lack of variety in German beer and the Reinheitsgebot does nothing to ensure any actual quality.
Is craft beer better?
The true hipster question, the source of much snobbery. Despite the whole craft beer revolution, most beer is still made by the big companies, and the general trend has been towards more consolidation. In the face of all this, a premium is placed on the smaller brands, and many of my Beerhour friends and I would dismiss many beers as being "corporate".
But is this fair? Are small-batch beers really better than the corporate brands?
This is a bit less clear-cut that I'd like. It's pretty obvious who the major international companies are (e.g. Anhauser-Busch/InBev, Heineken, Carlsberg, SABMiller) and the list of different breweries owned by these companies is almost as long as my list of beers itself. But then you get into the second tier of companies, and it's more difficult to see who makes the cut. Boston Beer Company (the makers of Samuel Adams) passed the "craft beer" volume cut-off in the US and then lobbied to have that volume threshold raised - are they still craft? Ehhhhhh, that seems like cheating. Moortgat is a major brewery in Belgium whose brands (Duvel, Leifman's) are pretty accessible in many places, but they're definitely a more niche group.
In the end, the smaller companies that I deemed "corporate" are:- Sapporo (owns Sleeman Brewing and Unibroue)
- Yeungling
- New Belgium
- Kirin
- Sierra Nevada
- Gambrinus (makes Shiner beers, among others)
- Genesee (Pyramid)
- Moortgat (d'Achouffe, Duvel, Liefmans)
- Oetker Group (Jever)
- Craft Brew Alliance
- North American Breweries
- Marston's
- Greene King
- Wells & Young's
- Heineken
- AB/InBev
- SABMiller
- Molson Coors
- Pabst Brewing Company
- Tsingtao
- Diageo (Guinness and others)
- Distell (they make a few ciders, nothing I've rated yet)
- CR Snow (a large company within China, I've never seen any of their beers)
- Asahi
My unscientific cutoff for craft-but-still-corporate breweries in the US was to take anyone in the top-ten largest breweries from here, and add the British national breweries as well. I'm certain I'm missing some other German companies in this mix, but this is all an area of active research.
Plus, who brews what gets a bit more complicated. Companies will subcontract to each other to brew for a region, and brands get traded around like playing cards. Sometimes companies will team up, like SABMiller and Molson Coors making MillerCoors in the States, and then I have to figure out who gets the credit for a beer.
So, with all of that said, here's the ratings:
Even more of a mess, but again data roughly looks normal.
Keeping only the results where I have at least 3 ratings. P-value is relative to Craft/Independent.
Now, with all the data, I have to swallow my anti-corporate bent--mostly. While I've generally found the beers from SABMiller, Heineken, and Molson Coors to be pretty poor, Anhauser-Busch and Carlsberg are right up there with the craft beers. Moortgat is definitely a sign of quality, and Sapporo does very well - though that's mostly because they own Unibroue (makers of La Fin Du Monde).
So, no longer will I dismiss a beer because "it's from the Budweiser folks". I'll have to be more discerning in my anti-corporate beer snobbery.
Incidentally, I also liked Pabst Blue Ribbon better than Heineken. Frank Booth was on to something.
Final thoughts:
There's still a lot more data I'd like to learn, but this has been fun to compile. I'd like to credit Beer Advocate, Rate Beer, and BreweryDB for all the data I've collected from their sites; BreweryDB even lets you get your own API so you can pull data from their site automatically, which I'm planning on setting up soon. I used the Seaborn Python plotting library for making my figures less ugly. My code for the database can be found on GitHub for those who'd like to play with it, though be warned that it's still very much a work in progress.
I currently have a few French and Irish beers in the fridge, ready to go, and I'm off to Poland tomorrow, where I shall sample the local wares. Though, for the moment, I'm taking a break. Drinking beers has been fun but I think I've had enough for a bit.
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*It once-upon-a-time used to be the drinking group for several grad students in the Aeronautics department, but I inadvertently turned it into my cult of personality.
**I still don't know what I'm going to do with my Pi. Probably just stick X-COM on it.
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