GABF Heat Map

Confirms what I've always thought: Southern California is the king of craft beers. California in general is killing it.

 

Well we sort of might expect that from the 5th largest economy in the world and the most populous state in the US. :-)

 

We might expect it but I feel like Colorado and Oregon are still regularly touted as have the best breweries top to bottom. This is certainly not a definitive litmus test but it is interesting, non-the-less

 

Yes, it is indeed an interesting map and the pattern that emerges from looking at the information in the form of heat map suggests that the concentration of award winning breweries in the southern California area, the Denver area, the Portland area and the Seattle area is as strong as folks from each of those areas like to claim. Better in any one area? Not so clear.

 

Would love to see this over a 13 year span and for there to be some notification if said medal winning beer is still around (at all, seasonally, regularly etc). I see many touting their medal accomplishments but those beers are never available.

 

Woo mid MO. Interesting to see such a West coast tilt, I figured the East would have a stronger hot spot.

 

I'll concede number 1 to California. Interesting way to plot this. Oregon, Colorado, the North East and the Carolina's are all honorable mentions.

 

Pretty cool, but with so many entries, its basically a crap shoot nowadays given which beer shows best out of the plethora of others in any given category. The medal winners in each category could all be from breweries across the map that most have never heard of. That's why its so difficult to repeat as winner from year to year. Might be obvious....but I am just sayin.'

 

Confirms what I've said all along - SC is a beer wasteland.

 

South Carolina? Had Mexican Cake yet? If not, I recommend you get one (and I would love to have it again so send me one please)

 

Would like to see this done with BeerAdvocate reviews, especially since the reviews are time stamped which could allow for the time evolution of the map to be examined.

 

I'd be interested to see this relative to total breweries/beers in the area or perhaps relative to number of entries from each area/state/brewery etc. It would give some sense of quality per quantity rather than raw quality without respect to quantity. We would likely need to break down the map into each geographic hot spot, defining boundaries and, at the least, determining number of breweries in that area, or to be even more thorough, number of beers produced in that area, and then dividing the number of award winning beers by either of those numbers. It would give us some sense of "great beers per brewery" or "great beers per beer produced." But that would be exceptionally tedious and a significantly larger amount of work. Maybe we can open source this thing like Foldit!

It's not shocking to see the densest beer producing area with the highest signal. But is it because there is a huge amount of beer being produced or is it because it's all high quality? Again, some kind of relation of quality to quantity would be interesting. I wouldn't claim that California is "king of craft beers" based on raw numbers like this as they don't really tell the whole story. It's like having two populations of people, one of 500 and one of 250. If the populations are random we can still expect that the larger population probably has more people with brown hair. Same to be said if an area has 2x as many breweries as another, if given a random distribution of quality, we should still expect more medals to correlate with more breweries. But can we also assume that top to bottom they're better than another area? Not with any certainty, as this doesn't give us that information. Some of the best beer I've drank is from SoCal, as is some of the worst.

The only conclusion we can draw from it is that in SoCal you have a lot of options for great beer, and there's nothing wrong with that.

 

I've had beer from damn near every brewery from LA to SD to OC. Yes, there are some bad ones (Absolution is probably the worst "professional" beer I've had), but the overwhelming majority are top notch.

I agree it would be interesting to factor in population density, but I don't think it would change the result. Take the top three in each area in the US.

If you separate Southern California, LA has Beachwood, Smog City, and Monkish, if you ask me (soon to be Modern Times). SD has Modern Times, Société, and Stone (you could argue Port/Lost Abbey should be switched for Société). OC has The Bruery, Noble, and Bottle Logic (clearly the best top three, IMO).

I'd stack any of those against anyone else's top three in an area of comparable population density, especially OC. As much as I despise that place, they're killing it and actually have less population density than the other areas. If you take the top three from each area (Modern Times [okay, probably Stone], Beachwood, and The Bruery) there's nothing that can beat that in any state.

What do you think?

 

That's some strong work my friend! Thanks for sharing!

We Southern Californians are certainly blessed.

 

That's getting tougher to come by...last year I was only able to snag 3 bottles...for trading purposes only, I'm not crazy about the stuff

 

Do the states with few pins indicate states that make bad beer or states that don't dive a damn about GABF?

 

What do I think?

Well the limitations I see of the overall data set include:
a) there's only one year's worth of data so many breweries with medals from before are not represented;
b) the selection process, while not totally random, only really filters out beers that are not candidates for a medal and after that what a medal really means is on that particular day of judging that particular beer was one of several good ones that happened to be in the right place at the right time;
c) to talk about long range quality, population density must be factored in, much as you did in your post, since it takes a certain critical mass of customers who will drink your beers to support enough breweries that will be motivated enough to enter and, statistically, as there is a greater density of breweries motivated to enter the likelihood than any one will be good enough to pass the cut and be standing in the right place at the right time goes up;
d) styles are not irrelevant but are concealed in this heat map.

So basically I think population density does matter in determining density of medals and that there are a few other locations in the US where, a list of high quality breweries such as you propose for So CA (and that can't be matched outside of So CA) could be assembled. For example, Troeg's Sunshine Pils, Stoudt's Pils, and Victory Prima Pils all qualify and all have medaled at GABF yet will not be represented in the heat map since only one year is represented. These beers and a few other top shelf Pils beers in SE PA create a greater concentration of German style Pils beers than exist almost anywhere else in the US and certainly can not be matched in So CA.

So my bottom line is it's an good map and, as you suggested, reveals certain interesting things but, at the same time, also conceals other things.​

 

Well remember me if you score again next go around. I would trade with you. Have a fridge full of sip of sunshine. Fresh Pliny, etc. I always have something good.

 

While that makes some sense, I don't think it factors in the beer culture of a given area. There's a reason West Coast IPA is a style; it's a distinct style of the region that didn't happen anywhere else, like Belgians. Even today, no one makes Belgians like Belgium.

You seem to suggest that there is a population threshold that, when met, will result in craft beer nirvana. I'd actually argue the opposite: when you have quality craft brewers, it creates a growing consumer market for great craft brew.
Let's say, hypothetically, Stone developed in Iowa instead of SoCal in the 90s. I think the beer Mecca may very well be in Iowa.

Now, I suppose one could argue that the size and craft beer market in SoCal gives brewers more freedom to experiment. But again, I think that starts with the brewers, not the consumers. Good breweries created craft beer consumers because no one was making good beer for such a long period of time.