Why Do We love Beer? Crack a Cold One and Let’s Find Out.
One out of every 25 swimming pools in the US is enjoying a refreshing cold beer on a Saturday afternoon. That means you can go to any pool this Saturday and have a 5% chance of enjoying a cold brewski with the boys. What is it about these hops and fizz that makes us purchase over 10 million barrels of craft beer annually? Let’s crack open the bottle and find out.
Before we understand why we love individual beers, we have to understand what beers are most popular. After analyzing over 176 beer styles and almost 73,400 beer recipes, here’s what we learned about the popularity of beer styles.
IPA is by far the most popular; beating Pale Ale by 60%. The third most popular (Saison) falls behind Pale Ale by 163% and almost 3x behind IPA. Everything after that just trickles down to 2–3% popularity. In IPA We Trust.
When we broaden the categories, we’re shown a more steady decline of interest of darker beers. This is why IPA’s and Ale’s reign supreme. People just love bitter, more session-able ales.
Check it out:
The most interesting section of the above chart is the minuet difference between Ale and Pale Ale. We’re going to break this down later as to why the popularity drops 30%. We’ll analyze the different characteristics of each style and see why each are preferred.
The conclusion we can draw here is that darker beers (Stouts) lag behind the more mainstream enjoyed beers such as IPA’s. This suggests the demand for more bitter beers. To quantify the levels of bitterness, lets next look at the ABV and IBU of each style types.
Here’s what the general ABV distribution looks like. Normal looking distribution but with an interesting looking tail; this points to some of the beers having some higher concentrations of alcohol.
After looking at some of the data points in the tail, we find that ~2,400 beer recipes (or 3.26%) have ABV higher than 10, ~200 (or 0.29%) have ABV higher than 15, ~50 (or 0.07%) have ABV higher than 20, ~30 (or 0.05%) have ABV higher than 30, and ~10 (or 0.01%) have ABV higher than 50.
Yikes. Just for pure science purposes, lets look at what those beers are:
Vedo triplo, Belgbert, FBTCZECHBEER, Skåpsrens, Tuna Beer, Black ipa, and BCBD RIS. So after you down a couple shots of Vodka, you can chase it down with some smooth Skåpsrens (ABV of 54.74).
Getting back to our analysis of ABV, to get a better understanding of the popularity of beer styles, we’re going to break down the distributions in a violin style to better understand what ABV content makes it into popular beer.
So as expected, IPAs are generally around 7%, a comfortable amount for most people. That’s what makes them peak in popularity among others, but there’s also got to be something else that makes them popular (we’ll get into this later). Next popular (Pale Ales), A little fatter around the waist (just like if you drink too much of it 😉). What’s the takeaway from this chart other than demonstrating the popularity of IPA and Pale Ales?
We can also takeaway that Stouts are the strongest and bitters are the weakest with the largest width around the lower ABV. Ciders are a huge range of distribution and pretty even from 5% to 8%. This is the most interesting and flat distribution of all them, so lets do some digging into it. After digging into the raw data of ciders, heres what we learned:
Cider ABV Data — Analysis of 192 Recipes
Mean: 7.18
Median: 6.38
Mode: 6.3
Range: 0.01–42.03
Standard Deviation: 4.86
Ciders and stouts have the largest standard deviation than of all the other beers. These beer styles are also amount the least popular, with Stouts in the bottom 50 percentile and ciders in the bottom 5 percentile. This can possibly point to why people enjoy IPAs and Pale Ales more, because they are the the inverse, people are expecting more consistent ABV.
With the variation in ABV, we need to look the brewing process and its correlation to ABV values. After running through a correaltive analysis, here is what we found:
Although there are no strong correlations, the largest being Pitch Rate & Boil Time (both just above 0.1), these do increase ABV. (Hint hint — this was the inspiration for the title of this blog). However, Mash Thickness reduces the ABV in beer.
What about IBU, or International Bitterness Unit, is a chemical measurement of the number of bittering compounds, specifically isomerized and oxidized alpha acids, polyphenols, and a few other select bittering chemicals, that make your beer taste bitter (The Brew Enthusiast).
Here is the IBU of all our analyzed beers:
The median of the IBU is 35.77, with the Mean sitting slightly above at 44.228, and a Standard Deviation of 42.95. Pretty normal looking distribution with a sharp peak. The fact the median is lower than the mean tells us the mode is less than the median and mean. This insight tells us that manufacturers are aware that most people like slightly less bitter beers (so all you “bitter is better” fellas out there can piss off).
This is great glimpse into the IBU, but lets breakdown it down by beer style and then see if there is a correlation between the two afterwards.
First, the IBU by beer style:
IPAs and Ales (Among the most popular beer styles as mentioned above) have a longer tail, more spread out distributions of IBU among their recipes. We learned earlier that IPAs and Ales tend to centralize their ABV content around 5–7%, now we learned that their IBU is in the lower mid range (relative to their competition). So we can make the argument that people enjoy a lower alcohol content beverage and want slight bitterness in their beer.
That’s a bit of a stretch so let’s see if we can find a correlation between not only IBU andABV, but any of the other factors in beer recipes. We’ll break it down further from there and see if we can figure out what it is about IPAs and Ales that people love.
I plotted all the different factors and here is what we found:
There isn’t a lot of correlation except for a few points. We specified earlier we’d look at the correlation of ABV and IBU, so lets look at that first.
By the looks of the chart, ABV and IBU have a slight correlation of 0.40. Not super strong but let’s look at some other points on the chart to see if we can find some other correlations. For the sake of length of this blog, we’re going to only focus on points with an absolute value of 0.8 or more, those ones are only worth noting anyway.
Focusing on the positive relationships first. The strongest correlations are between Mash Thickness & Brew Method Extract, Partial Mash, BIAB, All Grain. Next strongest are the tan-ish looking boxes, these show stronger correlation. Some of these include: Boil Time and Gravity, andTemperature and Gravity. Next down the list in lower correlation levels, but still worth noting are boxes colored pink. Boil Size and ABV, Mash Thickness and ABV (Which is expected considering what we saw in the figure above with all other factors compared to ABV).
On the flip side, we have a few pockets of light and dark blue boxes indicating negative relationships. The category that holds the most negative relationships is Sugar Scale; containing a little more than 25% of its 15 counter categories and negative relationships. Those negative relationships all have to do with Gravity. This makes sense because Gravity just has to do with the amount of sugar left over in beer after the fermentation process.
Finally and most notably, we have a sea of black boxes scattered around the chart, which indicates not many of these factors have much to do with one another. This is good because it lets us decipher which of these factors plays into what type of beers people like.
In conclusion, not any crazy correlations than what we expect but it’s cool to visualize what people love in their beer. And what is it they enjoy? Moderate ABV (5–7%), lighter colored beers.
