Brewery Observations
The insight below is from Untapped, a crowdsourced app where people rate the beers they drink. It is basically the authority on consumer preference when it comes to beer and is a good way of understanding wider sentiment towards breweries and beer styles 🍺. The data is taken from Untapped’s top 50 breweries in England.
With import.io I used the query API service to build an extractor that pulled out English brewery data. Below are some findings based on that data 📊.
1. Distribution trumps taste
Here we see that there’s little correlation between the average consumer rating of breweries and the total sum of ratings. The former metric gives us a good indication of what consumers like, the latter metric is a good indicator of overall sales. So because of the lack in correlation, it seems sales are less about how good a brewery’s beer tastes and more about the strength of a brewery’s distribution.
2. With variety comes consumer love*
There’s definitely some well-loved breweries who only produce or have produced a few key beers. However, in general, the A league have a history of brewing a wide variety of unique beers. Think Kernel, Brew By Numbers and Cloudwater. Each of theses breweries have sold 100’s of unique beers.
Yet whilst there’s a correlation in the data here, it doesn’t tell us if there’s any causality. Are those breweries with high satisfaction and high variety more established and thus had longer to develop? Does consumer satisfaction increase simply because there’s a wider range of styles to try and experience? Or does that wider range means there’s something for everyone? Perhaps sales are driven by a core range which has benefited from the experience of wider experimentation?
Whatever the reason it’s an interesting similarity been geographically dispersed breweries.
3. Playing at the top is tight
Just a 0.27 difference in consumer rating splits England’s ‘favourite’ brewery with the 50th ‘favourite’. Life at the top is hard work and every sale and subsequently, every rating matters.
“Consistency is the foundation of virtue.”
― Francis Bacon
Quick Caveats ☠
- The data is limited to the top 50 breweries in Untapped’s English ‘top brewery table’. For more info see how they work out those top 50.
- The data is not comprehensive — i.e. crowdsourcing is limited 🍻.
