Beer Data: Part 1

A few days ago, I attended the San Diego Economic Roundtable at the University of San Diego which included a panel of experts discussing the economic outlook for San Diego County. My favorite speakers were Marc Martin, VP of Beer, from Karl Strauss and Navrina Singh, Director Product Management, from Qualcomm. Singh had a lot to say about data, technology, innovation and start ups in San Diego County. Did you know that there are 27 coworking spaces, accelerators, and incubators in San Diego? I sure didn't. Martin's discussion of beer, all the data he showed,  along with some cool maps, sparked this blog post which has been a long time coming. In case you don't know, I'm quite the craft beer enthusiast! Allow me to nerd out as two of my favorite things come together: data and craft beer.

Martin's talk focused on the growing number of microbreweries and craft beer data. Here are some cool facts I came away with from his presentation that are worth mentioning again: 

• There are over 600 craft breweries in California.
• There are more than 115 craft breweries in San Diego. 
• San Diego breweries directly created over 6,200 jobs in San Diego in 2015.
• About 1.5 breweries open up every day in the United States.

On to my blog post: While searching for beer data for this blog post, I stumbled across a gold mine: BreweryDB.com. I got access to their data using API. In the last few days, I've looped through over 750 requests using Stata's shell command and Will's helpful post on Stata & cURL.

In the table below I've detailed the number of beers (listed as results) under each style ID in BreweryDB's database. There are a total of 48,841 beers as of January 17, 2016. When filtering for the word "Belgian" in the style name, I got a total of 5,883 beers. Can you guess what my favorite type of beer is?  :) I made the table below using Google Charts API table visualization. There are a total of 170 beer style IDs under BreweryDB and I've summed up the number of beers under each style. You can sort by ID, Beer Style or Results by clicking on whichever column title you'd like.

Disclaimer: This product uses the BreweryDB API but is not endorsed or certified by PintLabs.

​Seeing as BreweryDB's data is extensive and I'm oh-so excited to share with you some of my findings, I've decided to make a series of blog posts about this. This is why this is part 1. This is only the tip of the iceberg, my friends, and I'm not sure how big of an iceberg I'll be uncovering, but stay tuned for more. 
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