Data Viz DC: Beer Styles w/ @BeerLabyrinth

 

The recent craft beer renaissance and its attendant online communities of craft beer aficionados have created both a valuable digital resource and a headache for the lay beer drinker. On the one hand, these online communities have crowdsourced a comprehensive set of individual beer reviews to help the beer neophyte understand and navigate this rich space. On the other hand, online beer communities have developed such a huge volume of material with such a specific lexicon of tastes, colors, mouthfeel, and aromatic qualities that interested neophytes may need some visual guidance to help navigate this space.

 

Descriptive language is inherently high dimensional–a beer vocabulary may have thousands of words–but one need not read or understand every word in order to understand the approximate relationships between beers–beer styles are a quick proxy for these relationships among beers. Specifically, a handful