#beerdata says that you should enjoy light lagers 13% more than you currently do.

#beerdata
#beerdata
Sep 5, 2018 · 5 min read

We all happily live in a duality when it comes to beer. On the one hand, we have our favourite styles, that picture of the perfect beer that we start craving around 3pm on a Tuesday afternoon. On the other hand, we deeply resist the idea that one style is inherently better than another, we believe that, if it’s a stroke of brewing genius, then a table beer should be as celebrated as the most hyped DIPA.

My favourite beer style, hands down, is the Imperial Stout (preferably Cognac barrel aged). My longest pauses at the bar, my moments of greatest indecision, are often spent debating whether to try a new strong stout from a new or previously underwhelming brewery, versus ordering a different style from a brewery I know and love.

You can easily see this duality in the world of #beerdata and beer ratings. My last article was about Cloudwater Brew Co., a brewery that attracts high ratings pretty much regardless of what style they are brewing (though they see their very highest scores for their strong DIPAs and Stouts). This article tries to capture variation in style preferences regardless of brewer. It tries to determine which styles simply attract better ratings and how we might compensate for this bias to better evaluate beers and breweries. So next time I’m trying to decide between beers of different styles, what kind of mental arithmetic can I do to optimise my decisions?

To try to answer these questions with some authority, we took a sample of our favourite UK-based breweries over the last eight years. (Aside: what were the top beers from 2010? The ‘London Porter’ and ‘London Stout London 1890’ from The Kernel, and a beer called ‘Punk IPA’ from little Scottish brewery named Brewdog). I stripped out any beers without a recorded ABV, or with fewer than 25 ratings, in order to ensure I was working with representative samples. This left me with distinct beers, covering a wide range of styles that I simplified into eight broad categories ‘simple styles' (roughly based upon Beer Advocate’s definitions). I then calculated the rating (out of 5) required to break into the top 5% of each style and strength combination (the 95th percentile). The table below presents the results by style and strength.

Variation in 95th percentile of beer ratings by style and strength (0 to 5 scale)

What does this relatively boring table tell us? Two very clear results. Firstly, you can see that, regardless of style, beer ratings tend to increase with strength (with the exceptions of wild or sour beers which do not seem to gain from being Imperial strength [over 9%]). This is a remarkably consistent result.

Secondly, you can see that in addition to strength, drinkers' preferences also vary by style, with the best lagers receiving ~0.4 marks out of 5 fewer than the best imperial stouts.

Note that we’re looking here at the scores for the top 5% of beers to show what is possible of each style. This means that when we speak of lagers, for example, we’re not talking about Fosters, we’re talking about beers like the Wild Beer Co.’s Eisbock, Cloudwater’s IPL, and North Monk’s Adjunct Lager. Classics of the style, if you will.

The table below shows the best beer, by style and strength, in our dataset. I’m sure that you can agree that this is a phenomenal menu of beers across the board (how many of these have you been fortunate enough to try? I think I’ve had 8/31). Somebody should run a charity beer night with a menu like that!

Best beers by style and strength (from prominent UK craft breweries since 2010, only beers with 25+ ratings).

So where does this leave us? Well if you are anything like me (e.g. a bit nerdy, and also trying to cut back on beers, and spend less money) then you might sometimes order beer based upon ratings (sacrilege you cry!). This means that if you are sacrificing your health for the sake of enjoying #craftbeer, at least you are getting the most quality haze per year of reduced lifespan! #lifehacks!

With that in mind, next time you are scrolling through beer ratings deciding whether to buy a Pale Ale or an Imperial Stout, you may wish to refer to the table below. This is essentially the inverse of the first table, and it tells you that if, for example, you are debating between a 2% lager, and a 10% stout, you should expect the stout to have a 13% better score than the lager. If it doesn’t then maybe you want to try something lighter for a change!

Adjustment to beer ratings to account for variation in score by style and strength

Of course, I don’t really expect people to walk around performing mental arithmetic like this whilst trying to enjoy a few drinks. Boozing is, after all, an art rather than a science. What this conversion table does however allow us to do is compare the ratings of different styles and strengths of beers in an equitable manner. It allows us, for example, allow us to compare a brewery that specialises in strong IPAs (such as Cloudwater) against a brewery better known for Sours (such as Chorlton). The last thing we want to do is throw all our boozy love at a brewery just because they focus on a few popular styles or make strong beer. Ratebeer have had a similar adjustment for years with their ‘Style Score’, but this is the first time (as far as I’m aware) that such an adjustment has been made to the more popular Untappd ratings system.

As a taster of what’s possible, here’s the top 10 best UK craft beers from our list when we adjust to compensate for style and strength. As you can see, the only survivors from the previous table are the Cloudwater and Verdant IPAs. This table looks much better for Mills Brewing, who make some remarkably high-rated sours and saisons.

Top 10 UK Beers after adjusting for style and strength rating bias.

Please do share this article and follow this channel (or @boozyborders) on twitter to see these newfound powers put to good use in future articles! In the meantime, drink well and may the #beerdata be with you.

#craftbeer and #data fanatics based in London.

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