Beer Data: Part 3 - San Diego Beer

​Let's get local. I'm talking about San Diego beer. This is the third post regarding data I've downloaded and cleaned from BreweryDB. For a while now, I've been wanting to map all the breweries in San Diego County. Why? Well, for starters, San Diego is a great place for craft beer enthusiasts and I keep hearing about how many breweries there are in SD County. Secondly, why not? If you've got the data, use it. So now with BreweryDB and their brewery information, I can finally do that. See the map I made below. Note, however, that this map doesn't include ALL breweries in SD County. The data from BreweryDB that I downloaded is only for breweries that had at least one "verified" beer entry in their database. Also, I only included unique breweries, leaving out tasting rooms or additional brewery locations. This left me with 76 breweries which have been mapped below:

​This visualization was made with Stata and Google Charts API using the links to brewery icons from BreweryDB. Any breweries without icons are shown with default red markers.

Of the available beers in BreweryDB for these 76 SD County breweries, the make-up of beer styles is as follows:

​It's a pretty good variety of beer and it's great if you love Pale Ales, IPAs or Double IPAs as those seem to be the most common types of beers brewed in SD (within the North American Origin Ales category). 

Using Stata's gpsbound command, the 2010 Census county shape files, and the latitude and longitude brewery information within the BreweryDB dataset, I summed up the number of breweries in each county and each state.

]Top 10 Counties by Brewery Counts*

Top 10 States by Brewery Count*

*This only includes breweries from BreweryDB that had at least one verified beer entry in the database. 

California ranks first in terms of unique breweries among states and San Diego County ranks first among the counties from this dataset. San Diego is a pretty great place if you like craft beer (and even if you don't, San Diego is a pretty likable place with perfect weather). The breweries here make all kinds of beers and most tasting rooms are dog and family friendly. Go check one out if you're around. Some of my favorite SD County breweries are:

• Mike Hess Brewing 
• Thorn Street Brewery
• Belching Beaver Brewery
• Mother Earth Brew Co.
• The Lost Abbey
• Pizza Port Brewing Co.

Cheers!