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Introduction

 

  6.3 Billion Gallons of Beer was consumed by Americans last year which makes it appropriate to say that Beer is a staple in American culture. According to recent stats 40 percent of Americans named beer as their alcoholic drink of choice. The craft beer industry is currently undergoing unprecedented growth across America. 

   The analysis has been done using dataset that has been obtained by web scraping the CraftCans website. This website lists 2692 craft canned beers.Understanding the distribution of beer in each state will be of interest to people who want to know what kind of beer is popular and how many breweries are available in their region.

Key Questions

 

  Some of the questions that we tried answering through the analysis were

  • Are there differences in the IBU (International Bittering Units of the beer), ABV(Alcohol by volume of the beer) or Style between geographical regions

  • Differences in type of beer in East Coast vs the West Coast

  • The number of breweries in each state

  • Further analysis on style and type of beer for state with highest percentage of breweries. 

Design Process

 

Once we decided what to visualize, we conducted a literature review on the different kinds of research that has already been done- on how to visualize multidimensional and temporal data, using craft beer dataset and on storytelling. Post our literature review, we sketched out different ways in which we can visualize the difference in styles in craft beer and number of breweries for various states in USA.

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After drawing the sketches we realized that maps are the best way to show our analysis. We formalized the designs into visualizations using tableau and other visualization tools which will mainly use map visualizations. Also we concentrated on the fact that the visualizations should be interactive and dynamic so that users had a better experience in understanding the study.

Initial Data Exploration

 

   The first step involved initial cleaning and exploration of data using Python and Tableau. There were two csv files which contained breweries and beer data which we merged to make a single dataset.

The following bar chart represents the number of breweries by each state. As it can be seen Colorado has the largest number of breweries while Washington DC has the least.

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   The following visualization shows the correlation between bitterness and alcohol by volume of top 10 styles of beer produced. American IPA and American Amber/ Red Ale combines too many IBUs and ABVs. The IBU and ABV range of American Blonde Ale and American Pale Wheat Ale are almost identical. American Double / Imperial ALE is the most bitter and alcoholic beer. American Brown Ale and American Porter are almost identical with relatively low IBU and wide range in abv. American Pale Ale tends to be a soft beer.

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   The scatterplot shows the ABV vs IBU graph for all the styles of beers in our dataset to see a correlation between them. It was seen that for most of the beers the IBU was less if the ABV was low which means that the beers which have high alcohol by volume are bitter.

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Analysis

 

  The above visualization shows the number of breweries in each state. The size of the beer mug represents the count of number of breweries in each state.If you select a state a table is activated which shows the breweries located in each city for that state. If you hover over a dot, a detailed beer description for the brewery is displayed. The description includes the styles of beer, the ibu, abv and ounces for each style of beer. Portland city has the most recorded number of breweries.

   The above figure describes the differences in bitterness and alcohol by volume of beers in each state. A heat map shows representation of alcohol by volume percentage used in beers produced in each state. The dots represent the bitterness unit of craft beers. The size of dot represents the bitterness percentage in beers produced in each state. If you hover a state, the left table shows the style of beers produced in each city for that state. If you select a city the third table, then shows the ibu and abv unit for each style of beer produced.

Difference between East and West Coast

 

   The most important question that we wanted to answer through this analysis was to see the difference of distribution of craft beer between east and west coast.

The following heat map shows the difference in number of breweries and the composition of craft beer between east and west coast.

The number of breweries and alcohol by volume content of beer is more in west coast as compared to east coast.

Key Takeaways

 

  • Colorado State has the maximum number of breweries

  • Maximum number of breweries produce the beer style American IPA 

  • The beer style English Barleywine has the maximum Alcohol by Volume content while American Barleywine is the most bitter beer style produced

  • West coast has larger number of breweries than east coast

  • Both west and east coast prefer the beer style Witbier

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We also created a storyboard that explains in sequence the Craft Beer Story of America

   Going forward we would like add other data like sales and revenue information to do a more in depth analysis of popularity of craft beer in USA. 

West Coast in general has more number of breweries probably due to the large size of the states or the greater demand. This can be a future work to unveil. Regardless, we can say that people will continue to drink and enjoy American beers, albeit some more than others.

Conclusion and Future Work

 

References 

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