Daniel J. Leonard, Author at Beer Syndicate Blog

Author: Daniel J. Leonard Page 4 of 22

Our list of “The Best Beers and Breweries of 2018” is the result of a combined analysis of the top rated beers as determined by over 10 million collective beer reviews as reported by the three separate beer rating websites BeerAdvocate, Untappd and RateBeer.

Here’s how it works:

In order to rank the top beers from Untappd, RateBeer, and BeerAdvocate, we started by combining all of the top 50 beers from all three websites into a single super list, and then removed any meads, retired beers and any duplicate beers including multiple vintages.

This brought the total number of beers on the list down to 75. Next, we assigned a score to each remaining beer on the list by averaging a given beer’s score from Untappd, RateBeer and BeerAdvocate. Finally, we arranged all the beers on the list from highest to lowest score, and identified the top 50.

The Top 10 Beers are listed below, however the entire top 50 can be found here.

The Top 10 Beers of 2018

RANK	NAME	BREWERY	SCORE
1.	Kentucky Brunch Brand Stout	Toppling Goliath Brewing Company	4.666
2.	Dark Lord - Marshmallow Handjee	3 Floyds Brewing Co.	4.63
3.	Hunahpu's Imperial Stout - Double Barrel Aged	Cigar City Brewing	4.623
4.	Zenne y Frontera	Brouwerij 3 Fonteinen	4.586
5.	Mornin' Delight	Toppling Goliath Brewing Company	4.576
6.	Pliny The Younger	Russian River Brewing Company	4.573
7.	Barrel-Aged Abraxas	Perennial Artisan Ales	4.566
8.	Barrel Aged Imperial German Chocolate Cupcake Stout	Angry Chair Brewing	4.543
9.	Juice Machine	Tree House Brewing Company	4.536
10.	Trappist Westvleteren 12 (XII)	Brouwerij Westvleteren	4.53

[Note: Untappd lists beers of different vintages as separate individual entries such as with the many “Bourbon County” vintages from Goose Island, whereas BeerAdvocate and RateBeer simply combine all the vintages and assigns a single entry and single score. To simplify our list, we combined all vintages of the same label on Untappd, averaged the score, and then averaged that score with the scores from RateBeer and BeerAdvocate.]

Determining The Top Breweries of 2018

To calculate our list of top breweries, first we combined all of the beers that appeared on RateBeer, Untappd, and BeerAdvocate’s top 50 into a single super list. Then, each brewery was awarded a single point for each beer it had on the super list, excluding meads and retired beers.

Finally, the breweries were ranked by the number of points they had, with tiebreakers being determined by the average score(s) of the beer(s) per brewery. To determine the average score of a given beer, we simply averaged that beer’s individual score from RateBeer, BeerAdvocate and Untappd.

The Top 10 Breweries of 2018

RANK	BREWERY	# OF BEERS	AVERAGE SCORE
1.	Tree House Brewing Company	18	4.42
2.	Toppling Goliath Brewing Company	10	4.53
3.	3 Floyds Brewing Company	7	4.40
4.	Cigar City Brewing	6	4.54
5.	Hill Farmstead Brewery	6	4.43
6.	AleSmith Brewing Company	6	4.40
7.	Founders Brewing Company	5	4.48
8.	Goose Island Beer Co.	5	4.43
9.	Russian River Brewing Company	5	4.41
10.	Funky Buddha Brewery	4	4.47

[All rating data was pulled from RateBeer, BeerAdvocate and Untappd on 3/19/18.]

And of course no beer list would be complete without somebody explaining why it sucks. So for your entertainment, we’ve included a conversation with the dreaded “Critique Master” below who does an utterly thorough job of destroying our beer list and possibly every other beer list there is.

Enjoy!

A Conversation with Critique Master about the Top Beers:

Critique Master: First things first: we’re barely a third of the way through 2018, so how the heck can you make any semblance of a claim about the year’s “top beers and breweries” when the year isn’t even over yet? Even if you combine all the data from BeerAdvocate, RateBeer and Untappd, that data is subject to change at any moment, right? So isn’t this just a list of what’s best at this very second and not really useful? Just sayin’…

BeerSyndicate: Wow, coming straight out the gate swinging, huh? Fair enough, I guess. So yes, you’re partially correct, the beer ranking of top beers on RateBeer, BeerAdvocate and Untappd is subject to change. But just because something can change, doesn’t mean that it will. At least not much in this case, anyways.

For example, looking back almost one year ago today, 10 of the first 11 beers of BeerAdvocate’s top beers back then were the very same beers on the top of its list today. In fact, if one beer in the top 11 hadn’t been retired (namely King JJJuliusss from Tree House Brewing), the beers on that list from a year ago would be exactly the same as it is today with just a slightly different order. Other data points from RateBeer and Untappd were similar.

Critique Master: That’s all well and good, but do we really need another “best of” beer list? I get it, beer ratings can influence buying decisions sometimes in a major way like in the case of Westvletern, but I mean, can’t you spend your time doing something more important? Just sayin’…

BeerSyndicate: Yes and no, in that order… or some other order.

Critique Master: Very cute. Come to think of it though, technically this isn’t even really “your” list of “top beers”, is it? I mean, I think you guys are actually being really misleading because you’re basically just relying on all of the reviews from BeerAdvocate, Untappd and RateBeer, to which you’ve contributed exactly zero reviews.

Just sayin’…

BeerSyndicate: Well, our list was more about compiling and analyzing a larger amount of data in an attempt to get a more complete picture of the top rated beer and breweries. I don’t know, we thought it was a pretty cool idea, but you are the Critique Master, and we respect your title.

Critique Master: I am indeed the Critique Master, and you will tremble at my critiquing powers. Speaking of which, you mentioned that you excluded meads, retired beers, and different vintages of the same beer from your list? That doesn’t seem fair. Care to explain why you’re cherry picking the data?

BeerSyndicate: As tasty as mead can be, it’s a honey wine made only with honey, water and yeast. In other words, it’s not a beer. Beer, on the other hand, has to contain at least some grain. That said, if there was a braggot on any list, which, as you know, is a kind of mead made with the addition of barley malt, then we would have included it. But there wasn’t, so we didn’t.

As for excluding retired beers (which encompasses previous vintages of a given beer), we simply wanted to give a representation of the best beers currently being produced on the market and also make all of the data consistent since Untappd is the only site of the three that separates out certain vintages of the same beer.

This is just one way of looking at the data. You could certainly do it some other way.

Critique Master: Yeah, I’d probably do it a different way. Or actually I wouldn’t do it at all, because your entire dataset is flawed. Just sayin’…

BeerSyndicate: Here it comes.

Critique Master: For starters, Untappd doesn’t seem to have any set guidelines for how its users should rate a beer, so the justification for the average score of any beer is unclear, though my guess is that most users determine a rating based on how much the user “personally enjoys” a given beer, which is subjective.

On the other hand, BeerAdvocate has its users rate beer according to how well they think a beer represents the definition of the beer style listed on the BeerAdvocate website. And RateBeer is somewhere in the middle.

In other words, your list of “top beers” confusingly blends reviews that are based on purely subjective personal enjoyment like many on Untappd and also reviews that are rated according to some more fixed standard. Apples and oranges.

In addition, the varying levels of individual experience and palate acuity of the reviewers determining the score for a given beer on any social beer rating site is also problematic.

Not only that, but I bet it’s mainly Americans who are doing the beer reviews, so that limits your results to mainly the American beer scene and palate, and to a lesser extent non-American English speakers. Just sayin’…

BeerSyndicate: It’s true— we’re taking the data from BeerAdvocate, Untappd and RateBeer at face value. And though we can’t say for certain, you’re probably right that the user base of all three websites is likely mainly American, and then non-American English speakers.

You’re also right to question the level of experience any users has on any of those sites and how that might affect the relative objectivity of any beer’s score.

That said, we never claimed that our list is a list of the “best beer in the world”. It could be, but all we said was this is a list based on an analysis of the top beers per RateBeer, Untappd and BeerAdvocate.

But you have a valid point when it comes to the subjectivity of scoring a beer based on personal enjoyment as you assume many users on Untappd do. People have different personal preferences, so beer scores based on those kinds of reviews may not necessarily be very useful to everyone.

If you think reviews from Untappd are too subjective or more of a social app than a serious rating site, we could show you what the top 10 beers would look like if we totally excluded Untappd’s data, and only show you the combined results of the top beers from RateBeer and BeerAdvocate?

Critique Master: I’m mildly interested. Go ahead and show me your findings, but make it quick.

BeerSyndicate: Right away, but only because you’re mildly interested:

[Below are the top 10 beers based only on BeerAdvocate & RateBeer data]

RANK	NAME	BREWERY	SCORE
1.	Kentucky Brunch Brand Stout	Toppling Goliath Brewing Company	4.685
2.	Zenne y Frontera	Brouwerij 3 Fonteinen	4.58
3.	Hunahpu's Imperial Stout - Double Barrel Aged	Cigar City Brewing	4.565
4.	Mornin' Delight	Toppling Goliath Brewing Company	4.55
5.	Dark Lord - Marshmallow Handjee	3 Floyds Brewing Co.	4.535
6.	Pliny The Younger	Tree House Brewing Company	4.525
7.	Trappist Westvleteren 12 (XII)	Brouwerij Westvleteren	4.515
8.	Barrel-Aged Abraxas	Perennial Artisan Ales	4.505
9.	Barrel Aged Imperial German Chocolate Cupcake Stout	Angry Chair Brewing	4.495
10.	Canadian Breakfast Stout (CBS)	Founders Brewing Co.	4.485

Critique Master: Huh, 9 out of 10 beers from the list without Untappd’s data were the same as the list with it. But that could mean anything. And anyways, the source data from all of these beer review sites— and even your data— could still be untruthful, corrupt or suspect in some way.

For example, Anheuser-Busch InBev acquired a minority stake in RateBeer back in 2016, so even if we assume RateBeer’s data was otherwise perfect, I now have at least a minority reason to be skeptical.

Funny— you’d think that with the glut of AB-InBev-owned Goose Island beers in Untappd’s top 50, it was Untappd that was being influenced by Anheuser-Busch. Anyways.

But here’s an even bigger problem with all of these “top beer” lists: they’re just lists of over-hyped beer. And this is largely because few if any of the beer reviews on Untappd, etc. are done blind.

BeerSyndicate: It’s a fair point to make that the “hype factor” may have some effect on some of the beer reviews that appear on BeerAdvocate, RateBeer and Untappd. But exactly how to account for the “hype factor” and to what degree that hype even has an effect on those reviews is up to speculation.

Sure, some folks might over-score a hyped beer, but some might unfairly under-score a hyped beer because it doesn’t live up to mountains of hype. And then some might be impartial and not let the hype influence their judgment either way.

So it seems reasonable that blind tastings are potentially helpful for eliminating some of the elusive “hype factor”, though someone doing a blind tasting may think they know what beer it is that they’re sampling, and somehow that could affect their scores.

Nevetheless, most professional and homebrewing competitions in the U.S. are judged blind.

If you like blind beer reviews, you might like the ones Paste Magazine puts out.

Critique Master: Actually, even though Paste Magazine does blind reviews, they score beer according to “personal enjoyment” similar to many Untappd reviews, which, like I said, is pretty darn subjective.

I mean, why go through all the trouble of doing a blind review in the name of objectivity just to introduce subjectivity back into the equation by judging beer according to personal enjoyment instead of some independent publicly established standard like the BJCP Beer Style Guidelines?

Just sayin’…

BeerSyndicate: Not sure. We still like Paste beer reviews, but you might have a point.

That said, beer styles can change over time, so a fixed definition of beer would also have to be subject to change. Paste might be trying to account for the real-time evolution of beer styles by not strictly adhering to past publications of the BJCP Beer Style Guidelines.

Critique Master: Nice try, but basing a beer review on “personal enjoyment” isn’t the same thing as trying to account for a possible subtle development of a particular beer style. Just sayin’…

BeerSyndicate: Alright, so to sum up your position thus far: You have a problem with the beer reviews from Paste and Untappd because they base their reviews on personal enjoyment, which is subjective.

You’re suspect of RateBeer reviews because AB InBev owns a minority stake in the company.

You have a problem with BeerAdvocate because similar to Untappd and RateBeer, its users aren’t necessarily preforming blind tastings to rate beer.

And you obviously don’t like our list of top rated beers because, well, you don’t like the data it’s based on.

Does that about cover it?

Critique Master: Almost. Rating a beer based on personal enjoyment is obviously problematic due to the subjectivity of personal preference, so to make things less subjective, it’s better to rate beer according to a fixed standard like the BJCP Beer Style Guidelines.

Even if you view the style guidelines as purely conventional, sort of like the common convention of using inches or centimeters on a ruler, it’s still better to have a common public standard to rate beer than whatever private reasons an individual has for determining their personal level of enjoyment.

But even then, people still have to judge a beer based on their individual physiological sense of taste, which can vary from person to person. For example, people may perceive the intensity of certain taste sensations differently. About 25% of the population are supertasters and perceive certain flavors more intensely than other people, 50% are normal tasters, and 25% are non-tasters who perceive flavors less intensely than normal tasters and far less intensely than supertasters.

In other words, if you’re a supertaster, then your review of a given beer may not be as relevant to normal tasters, and even less so to non-tasters. Therefore, people conducting beer reviews should get tested to determine if they are a supertaster using a $5 test.

BeerSyndicate: No offense Critique Master, but hardly anyone will get tested to determine if they’re a supertaster, normal taster or a non-taster.

Not only that, but you’re gonna end up with three sets of beer reviews: one for supertasters, one for normal tasters, and one for non-tasters. Not to mention, the person reading the review would also have to be tested to know which beer review applies to them.

Then you’d also have to control for other conditions including the serving temperature of the beer, the kind of glass it the beer is served in, environmental distractions, the level of experience of the taster, the level of intoxication of the taster, maybe the diet of the individual like they do with professional coffee tasters, and I’m sure there are other factors we haven’t thought of.

It’s too prohibitive, especially just for the sake of beer reviews. It’s simply easier for the public to buy a given beer and try it for themselves.

Critique Master: Exactly. And because of this, most or maybe all beer reviews have very little practical application to the individual— except for maybe a blind review done by experienced individuals with trained palates according to a fixed standard and intended for their own personal use. I suppose this also goes for wine and food reviews too.

By the way, this also means that you’ve wasted your time doing your little analysis of the so-called top beers and breweries of 2018, assuming you were trying to generate any meaningful data in the first place.

Just sayin’…

Next on tap on the BeerSyndicate Blog: Ranking the Beers of Rodenbach!

Hi, I’m Dan: Beer Editor for BeerSyndicate.com, Beer and Drinking Writer, Award-Winning Brewer, BJCP Beer Judge, Beer Reviewer, American Homebrewers Association Member, Shameless Beer Promoter, and Beer Traveler.

Data Chug: An Analysis of RateBeer’s Top 50 Beers

By Daniel J. Leonard

On March 20, 2018

In Beer Inspired Thoughts

Beginning in 2000 as a general beer forum, RateBeer developed into one of the largest beer rating websites in the world, with a listing of more than 470,000 different beers in its database as of early 2013. Similar to other beer rating websites, RateBeer maintains an ongoing list of its top rated beers, 50 to be exact.

As with our previous analyses of BeerAdvocate and Untappd, we reviewed RateBeer’s Top 50 beers in an attempt to identify any trends regarding brands, beer styles, alcohol content, breweries etc.

For fun, we created a sortable list of RateBeer’s Top 50 Beers which can be arranged by brewery, country/state, ABV, etc. This is the same list that we used to generate most of the results below.

And now, on with the show.

1. The Top 10 Highest Rated Beers on RateBeer

1) Kentucky Brunch Brand Stout -Toppling Goliath Brewing Company
2) Trappist Westvleteren 12 (XII) – Brouwerij Westvleteren
3) Mornin’ Delight – Toppling Goliath Brewing Company
4) Hunahpu’s Imperial Stout – Double Barrel Aged – Cigar City Brewing
5) Bourbon Barrel Aged Dark Lord Imperial Stout – 3 Floyds Brewing Co.
6) Pliny the Younger – Russian River Brewing Company
7) Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout – Bourbon Vanilla Bean – 3 Floyds Brewing Co.
8) Speedway Stout – Bourbon Barrel-Aged – AleSmith Brewing Company
9) Bell’s Black Note Stout – Bell’s Brewery, Inc.
10) CBS (Canadian Breakfast Stout) – Founders Brewing Company

Interestingly, Toppling Goliath’s Kentucky Brunch Brand Stout is the top rated beer on both RateBeer and BeerAdvocate, and Mornin’ Delight from the same brewery also appears in the top 10 on both lists. The three other beers appearing on both the top 10 from RateBeer and Beer Advocate were Russian River’s Pliny the Younger, Three Floyds’ Dark Lord Russian Imperial Stout – Bourbon Barrel Aged and Cigar City’s Hunahpu’s Imperial Stout – Double Barrel Aged.

The only beer that RateBeer and Untappd’s share in the top 10 was Double Barrel Hunahpu’s from Cigar City.

2. The Most Popular Beer Style Listed on RateBeer’s Top 50

Of the more than the 100 different beer styles in the world, only 9 appeared in RateBeer’s list of its Top 50 beers. Of those 9 beer styles, it was Imperial Stout that stood out by far with 26 examples of this dark and boozy beer in the Top 50. Examples of Imperial Stout dwarfed the next most popular beer style, Double IPA, by almost 400%, making it a statistically significant outlier as represented by the green data point below.

Clearly, Imperial Stouts dominate RateBeer’s Top 50, comprising more than half of the beers on the list, which was nearly identical to the percentage of Imperial Stouts on Untappt’s Top 50 (52% vs 54%, respectively).

3. Analysis of the Alcohol Content of RateBeer’s Top 50

The majority of beers in RateBeer’s Top 50 had an alcohol content of greater than 9%, as can be seen in the chart below.

The average ABV of all the beers listed on Untappd’s Top 50 beers was a boozy 11.39%, which is similar to the 11.55% average ABV of Untappd’s Top 50.

The beer with the lowest ABV on RateBeer’s Top 50 was “Ann” from Hill Farmstead Brewery weighing in at 6.5%, while the most potent beer on the list was “Buba Extreme Jack Daniels BA” (16%) from the Polish brewery Browar Szałpiw.

These figures exclude the unlisted ABVs of “Trademark Dispute (Green),” an Imperial Stout from Cycle Brewing, and “Aaron,” a Barley Wine from Hill Farmstead. But seeing as how these beers were on the boozier end of the ABV spectrum, the average ABV of the Top 50 is not likely to be affected much.

4. Analysis of the States/Countries of RateBeer’s Top 50

Similar to both BeerAdvocate and Untappd, the majority (82%) of beers in RateBeer’s Top 50 were from American breweries. As shown in the chart below, only 9 beers in the Top 50 came from non-American breweries; Poland had 1, Sweden 2, and both Denmark and Belgium had 3 each.

The average number of beers per state/country listed above is 3.33, and the only state with a statistically significant number of beers in the Top 50 was California with 8, which is considered a statistical outlier. In three impressive cases, all the beers from a given state came from just one brewery, including Toppling Goliath in Iowa, 3 Floyd’s in Indiana, and Bell’s in Michigan.

When identifying outliers like California, we try to look for explanations as to why it is performing at a statistically significant level than other states or countries. One possible explanation for this is the number of breweries in California compared to other states/countries.

For example, some states have more breweries than others, which could potentially increase the number of beers from a given state or country listed in the Top 50. As mentioned, California has the highest number of beers in the Top 50 with a total of 8, which seems rather high at first glance. However, if you consider that there are just over 800 breweries in California as of this writing, the relative number of beers contributed by California to the Top 50 based on the number of breweries in the state was just 1.00%.

As shown in the chart above, no longer is California leading in relative terms, but rather Vermont is with 4 from a total of 84 breweries, or 5.48%. Interestingly, 3 out of 4 of the beers from Vermont appearing in the Top 50 were from Hill Farmstead, namely Aaron, Abner, and Ann. In other words, a large part of the reason why Vermont is performing at a statistically significant level is due to Hill Farmstead’s individual level of success.

5. Most Popular Breweries on RateBeer’s Top Rated Beers

Below is a chart of the number of beers per brewery appearing in RateBeer’s Top 50.

The average number of beers contributed per brewery was 1.92. On the face of it, not a single brewery stuck out as contributing a statistically significant number of beers to RateBeer’s Top 50.

However, some breweries produce a greater variety of beers than others, which might create a greater potential for breweries that brew a larger variety of beer to have more beers in the Top 50 than others. So let’s take a look at what happens when we consider the relative percentage of beers contributed by a particular brewery based on the number of beers that brewery produces.

As shown in green above, there were three breweries with a statistically significant percentage of beers in the Top 50 relative to the total number of beers they produce. These outlier breweries were Toppling Goliath (8.16%), Rochefort (33.33%) and Westvleteren (66.67%). The Belgian breweries of Rochefort and Westvleteren are special cases in that they produce only three beers each which they’ve perfected over hundreds of years, whereas Toppling Goliath is a relatively new American brewery (2009) that produces 49 different beers, one of which sits in first place on both BeerAdvocate and RateBeer’s top 50.

Not only is one of Toppling Goliath’s beers the highest rated on both RateBeer and BeerAdvocate’s lists (selling for upwards of $1,000 per bottle on the secondary market), but Toppling Goliath is the only brewery that was consistently determined to be contributing a statistically significant number of beers to the Top 50 relative to the number of beers it produces on BeerAdvocate, Untappd and RateBeer.

In other words, a statistical analysis of three separate beer rating sources with more than 10 million reviews combined have shown that Toppling Goliath is living up to its name in a pretty serious way.

But this wasn’t the only data-driven revelation we discovered after chugging all the numbers. In the final episode of Data Chug, we put it all together and deliver to you:

The Best Beers and Breweries of 2018.

Nah, the year ain’t over yet, but we’re just gonna go ahead and let the numbers speak for themselves.

Hi, I’m Dan: Beer Editor for Beer Syndicate, Beer and Drinking Blogger, Beer Judge, Gold Medal-Winning Homebrewer, Beer Reviewer, American Homebrewers Association Member, Shameless Beer Promoter, and Beer Traveler.

Data Chug: An Analysis of Untappd’s Top Rated Beers

By Daniel J. Leonard

On March 13, 2018

In Beer Inspired Thoughts

Founded in 2010, Untappd is a popular beer rating mobile phone application among other things. Untappd has exactly 50 beers on its Top Rated Beers list, and of course that data is subject to change over time.

We pulled the Untappd’s Top Rated Beers data on 3/7/18, and for your convenience, we created a sortable version of that list which can be used to arrange the results by brewery, beer style, state/country, ABV, etc.

That sortable list is available here: Untappd’s Top Rated Beers

Now on with the show…

1. The Top 10 Highest Rated Beers on Untappd

1) Proprietor’s Bourbon County Brand Stout (2014) – Goose Island Beer Co.
2) Rare Bourbon County Brand Stout (2010) – Goose Island Beer Co.
3) Bourbon County Brand Stout Vanilla Rye (2014) – Goose Island Beer Co.
4) Rare Bourbon County Brand Stout (2015) – Goose Island Beer Co.
5) King JJJuliusss – Tree House Brewing Company
6) King Julius – Tree House Brewing Company
7) Fundamental Observation (2016) – Bottle Logic Brewing
8) Very Hazy – Tree House Brewing Company
9) Double Barrel Hunahpu’s – Cigar City Brewing
10) Barrel-Aged Abraxas – Perennial Artisan Ales

As you might have noticed, Goose Island’s Bourbon County line of beers dominate the Top 10, gobbling up the first four places in part because of how Untappd often counts different vintages of the same beer as unique entries in the rankings.

In fairness to Untappd, the different vintages of Bourbon County are arguably unique beers utilizing a unique set of ingredients. For example, the top rated beer, Proprietor’s Bourbon County Brand Stout (2014), is made in rye barrels with cassia bark, cocoa nibs, panela and coconut water, and weighs in at 13.2% ABV. Compare that to Proprietor’s Bourbon County Brand Stout (2017) aged in bourbon barrels with bananas, roasted almonds, and cassia bark, with an ABV of 14%.

Other beer rating websites like BeerAdvocate often collapse a beer of different vintages into one entry, as with Bourbon County Brand Coffee Stout. Not to mention, Untappd leaves beers that are no longer brewed in the Top 50 including the top four beers, whereas such “retired beers” are removed from BeerAdvocate’s Top 50.

With that in mind, the flat out leader of Untappd’s Top Rated Beers remains Goose Island, a brewery that is no longer considered a craft brewery by the Brewers Association as of 2011 when the brewery was sold to Anheuser-Busch InBev for a reported $38.8 million.

2. Analysis of the Beer Styles Listed on Untappd’s Top Rated Beers

Of the more than the 100 different beer styles in the world, only 10 appear in Untappd’s list of its Top 50 beers. The chart below shows the number of examples of beer styles in Untappd’s Top 50, where both the “Double IPA” and “American Imperial Stout” data points are colored green to indicate that there are a statistically significant number of examples of those beer styles in the Top 50.

The variety of beer styles in the Top 50 is even less diverse if you lump “triple IPA” and “Double IPA” under the same category as BeerAdvocate and others do, and likewise combine “Milk Stout” and “Imperial Milk Stout” as one style. The diversity of beer styles shrinks even further if you remove “Melomel Mead,” a kind of fruit honey-wine, as shown in the chart below.

As you can see in chart above, American Imperial Stouts make up fully 54% of the beers in Untappd’s Top 50, while Double IPAs account for 27%, which means that 4 out of 5 beers in Untappd’s Top 50 was one of those two styles of beer. American Imperial Stouts and Double IPAs were also by far the most popular beer styles in both BeerAdvocate’s Top 250 and Top 50.

3. Analysis of the Alcohol Content of Untappd’s Top Rated Beers

The majority of beers in Untappd’s Top 50 tend to be a bit on the boozy side, as you can see in the chart below.

The average ABV is right at 11.55%. The beers with the lowest ABV on Untappd’s Top Rated Beers are “Julius” and “JJJULIUSSS” both from Tree House Brewing Co. and weighing in at 6.8%, while the most potent beer on this list was “Black Tuesday Reserve (2015)” from The Bruery with an alcohol content of 20.5%.

These figures exclude the unlisted ABV of “Rare Scoop” from Cycle Brewing. But seeing as how that beer is an American Imperial Stout, the average ABV is not likely to be affected much.

4. Analysis of the States/Countries of Untappd’s Top Rated Beers

With the exception of a single Lambic style beer from Brouwerij 3 Fonteinen of Belgium, all of the beers that appear in Untappd’s Top Rated Beers were from 13 American breweries, which may simply be a result of a predominantly American user base.

The average number of beers per state/country listed above was 3.57, and the only state with a statistically significant number of beers in the Top 50 was Massachusetts with 11. Interestingly, 10 out of the 11 beers from Massachusetts came from one brewery: Tree House Brewing Company.

Of course, some states have more breweries than others, which could potentially increase the number of beers from a given state in the Top 50. For example, California has the third highest number of beers in the Top 50 with a total of 5 beers, which may seem rather high at first glance. However, if we consider that there are just over 800 breweries in California as of this writing, the relative number of beers contributed by California to the Top 50 based on the number of breweries in the state is a mere 0.63%, which is the third lowest relative percentage as shown in the chart below.

Even when we look at the numbers this way, Massachusetts is still leading the pack with 11 beers in the Top 50 coming from a possible 168 breweries in the state, or 6.55%. Iowa follows close behind with 5 beers in the Top 50 in a state of 82 total breweries. Similar to Massachusetts, all 5 beers from Iowa came from just one brewery, namely Toppling Goliath Brewing Co.

5. Most Popular Breweries on Untappd’s Top Rated Beers

There were a total of 23 different breweries with at least one beer in Untappd’s Top Rated Beers, as shown in the chart below.

The average number of beers contributed per brewery was 2.17. However, any brewery with more than 3 beers in the Top 50 was considered a statistical outlier, which is indicated with a green data point in the chart above.

There were exactly four breweries contributing a statistically significant number of beers to Untappd’s list of Top Rated Beers: Tree House Brewing Co. with 11, Goose Island Beer Co. with 7, Toppling Goliath Brewing Co. with 5, and Side Project Brewing with 4.

Since some breweries produce a greater variety of beers than others, this might create a greater potential for breweries that beer a larger variety of beer to have more beers in the Top 50 than others. For instance, Goose Island had 7 beers in the Top 50, which was the second highest number of all. However, it turns out that Goose Island produces a whopping 250 different beers, which means just 2.8% of the beers that the brewery makes appeared in the Top 50.

Following this line of reasoning, below is a chart showing the percent of beers contributed by a particular brewery based on the number of beers that brewery produces.

There were four breweries with a statistically significant percentage of beers in the Top 50 relative to the total number of beers they produce. These outlier breweries are indicated with green data points in the chart above, namely Tree House (16.13%), Toppling Goliath (10.2%), and Side Project (7.55%).

The average percentage of beers contributed per brewery relative to the total number of different beers produced was 3.19%, and any brewery with more than 6.78% was considered to be an outlier.

Tree House and Toppling Goliath were also found to be contributing a statistically significant number of beers to both BeerAdvocate’s list of Top 250 and Top 50 Beers, which suggests that both of these breweries are of particular note.

However, there is at least one more major data point to consider in our quest to uncover the ultimate breweries: RateBeer.

Next on Tap… Data Chug: An Analysis of RateBeer’s Top 50 Beers

[expand title=”Disclaimer: (Click to Expand)“]

While the data obtained from Untappd is taken at face value for the purposes of this analysis, one is well within reason to further analyze that source data in terms of appropriate beer style grouping for the given commercial examples, ranking methodology, verification of actual breweries in production, etc. In addition, considering that much of the data collected by Untappd is added by its users, one may further wish to question how that user group may affect the overall data (% of English-speakers, % of American users, etc.).

Also, the methods and parameters of data analysis herein are but one way of looking at the given information. Furthermore, all of the data collected from Untappd occurred in March, 7th, 2018, and therefore represents a single time-slice of the beer landscape, which of course is subject to change in the future.

Lastly, interpretation of the data above is up to the individual, for as the old adage goes, there’s more than one way to brew a beer.

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Hi, I’m Dan: Beer Editor for Beer Syndicate, Beer and Drinking Blogger, Beer Judge, Gold Medal-Winning Homebrewer, Beer Reviewer, American Homebrewers Association Member, Shameless Beer Promoter, and Beer Traveler.

Beer Syndicate Blog

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Author: Daniel J. Leonard Page 4 of 22

BeerSyndicate’s Top Beers and Breweries of 2018

Data Chug: An Analysis of RateBeer’s Top 50 Beers

Data Chug: An Analysis of Untappd’s Top Rated Beers

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