This morning Andy greeted us with alcoholic data and the choice was between analysing wine or beer datasets. I chose the latter which turned out to be very challenging due to the lack of detailed statistical datasets.

I spent the morning searching online datasets and API’s to try and find a dataset suitable for tableau. Eventually, I came across Beeradvocate.com data on data.world that provided 1,586,614 reviews of around 45,000 beers. The data was structured as below:

Looking at the data, the pertinent information appeared to be the scoring categories, out of 5, for each beer. The four categories were aroma, appearance, palate and taste and each contributed to the overall rating for the beer. Moreover, I was interested in the reviews for each beer so I aggregated the average review ratings for each beer in Alteryx.

Now I had the average rating for each beer I needed to formulate a way in which to analyse the data in a form useful to others. After sketching a few ideas, I came up with the idea of creating a brewery and beer style recommendation tool based on the users preferred rating categories.

The dashboard gives the user the option to choose two of the four rating categories. The dashboard then returns either the top 10 breweries or beer styles based on the selected categories. The top 10 calculation finds the breweries or styles that have the most beers, with an average rating of at least 4.5, across the two user selected categories. In the example below, you can see a selection of aroma and taste has the Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery top with a selection of  29 beers.

2 days into dashboard week and I can already say it has been highly rewarding. Having daily deadlines and presentations will prepare us for the challenges we are likely to face in our future placements. If you wish to find breweries and beer styles that match your criteria, here’s a link to try the dashboard for yourself.

https://public.tableau.com/profile/jamie.gough#!/vizhome/breweryfirstgo/BeerRecommendations