Beer Based on Census Data

Need a break from the threads that seem to pop up with regularity on BeerAdvocate? I can't promise you this article will be up your alley, but I can promise it will be different from most of the articles that are posted on beer. No, it's not another "definitive" list of styles or style-bashing article from Thrillist. And it's not talking about when the craft beer "bubble" will burst.

It's about a statistician who thought it would be cool to synthesize census data into beer recipes, using standard demographic information as the basis for the composition of the recipe for a beer.

http://io9.com/transforming-data-into-beer-could-be-the-greatest-idea-1641594019

From the article:


"Yau is developing a program that spits out a beer recipe based on data from the latest American Community Survey release from the United States Census Bureau. The program creates a recipe for each county in the U.S., taking into account:

• Percent of people with at least a bachelor's degree
• Percent of people who are employed
• Percent of people covered by health care
• Median household income
• Population density
• Percent of population that is white, black, hispanic, and Asian"

There are a couple things to me that are cool about this--

1) By reducing beer to its component ingredients, he sort of steps outside of the constraints of style. Yes, certain counties will emulate certain styles based on what the data says should be in the beer and how much, but there isn't any specific aim for a county to be a specific style.

2) For people that are bored by something as mundane as census data, this could be a really cool way to get a conceptual feel for how counties vary based on the type of beer that results. I'm not a statistician, and I don't really keep current on census data, so I can't help but wonder--will counties within a similar geographical area all "taste" similar? Maybe neighboring counties will be more different from one another than say a county in one state will be to a county in a state on the other side of the U.S.

The only drawback is that the vast majority of us won't ever get to taste our county. So it's ultimately an intellectual exercise.

 

I think he's still working through all the translations, but I'm hoping to be able to come back and post an update if he ever posts a finalized list.

 

Did you read the article? It's about taking census data and assigning values from that data to equal a specific ingredient/quantity of ingredient in a beer recipe. It's not talking about figuring out what people in given geographic areas prefer when it comes to beer.

I don't mean this to be an insult--I'm just honestly not sure what you're talking about here.

Well, in the concept, a race (or income or other demographic trait) would only be equated to one trait within a beer recipe, so the resulting beer would really be a synthesis of all the demographic details of a given county. And I think @cookiequiz makes a good argument that converting census data to representative traits is no more reductive to people than the census itself.

 

Well crap, now I feel like a humorless dick.

No need to apologize, I just didn't understand.

 

Please, throw in to your heart's content. That's what make articles like this fun.

I will say this--while I understand where you are coming from, I think as long as the connections between demographic data point and recipe ingredient remain at such a granular level, you won't run into any uncomfortable situations where underprivileged communities are akin to light swill and privileged communities are barrel-aged imperial stouts. Especially if, as you note, the person choosing the connections is choosing only desirable beer characteristics to pair with those demographic points.

Part of what makes this interesting, to me, is that it's a very real possibility that communities with widely divergent demographic data could actually end up producing fairly similar tasting and high quality beers.

Unless I'm missing something about the article, I don't think there is a company. I don't think he's planning on selling these beers. It's an experimental exercise in data representation. He's not going to produce and sell a beer for each of the 3,007 counties in the United States.