NBS BIF #15 Hints and Hauls: Was it Over When the Canadians Bombed BIF #14? HELL NO!

C'mon. A pie chart for pairings?

 

Slow Boat Tavern is pretty close to me. I went to Zwanze day there once (maybe twice). Maybe I'll go to Peche Day this year. I've never heard of it before, but I've like the Peche I've tried.

 

I meant to do this last night, I’m gonna try and remember today.

 

@ovaltine hints, I took out the self explanatory ones...

Hint #4: My target has not reviewed one of my top ten highest rated beers, perhaps after our yearly vacation I will be able to correct that.

My highest rated beer is Edward, unless I screwed up my search I plan to correct this if I can.

Hint #5: My favorite band (I think its obvious) usually makes yearly stops in my targets home state each summer, and has for quite some time.

Indiana seems like it would be a random stop for most bands, so to me this sort of makes it stick out.

Hint #7: My students are taking there test right now so...There is an element on the periodic table that sounds like it could be named after my target's state.

The element symbol... In, Indium

Hint #8: This hint will help some of the previous hints be more useful without giving it away completely...we go on our yearly vacation in the same state that my favorite band formed in.

This combined with hint #4, made it possible to figure out I was talking about Edward.

Hint #9: a bunch of GIFs in this thread take place in your state...

All the parks and rec gifs courtesy of @snaotheus in good old Pawnee, Indiana

Then in a separate post..

Target, here is one last hint...we recently rated a beer the exact same way. I guess it's true, great minds do drink alike.

We both drank Zoe and rated it on the same day.

Lastly and most obvious if you listened...

If you watched the gate crashers suck Keller Williams video it gave away the venue whe @woemad guess the gorge...relevant lyrics.

-I was there at Deer Creek back in 1995
-And I never missed a Deer Creek show
-On my yearly Indiana vacation
From '89 to '95

 

Been a little while, but here's some random data for you. This one's easy peasy: Just counting positive, negative, and exactly zero rDevs over time. Here's the chart for all of our reviews (up until yesterday morning -- btw, we seemed to have added 40 reviews Monday through Thursday). rDev is a little bit of a tricky beast, however, because in theory if I refreshed *all* my data, a bunch of the rDevs would change based on other reviews being entered for the same beers. So, some of this is stale, but probably not a big impact on the overall result.


I made it really easy to look at one individuals (or actually a combination of people, or exclude people, or whatever). Here's mine on its own:


If you want to see yours, just ask, it'll take me about three minutes to put it together.

 

I mean, @Rub_This_BBQ already did a great job explaining it, but mine was really simple if you knew the trick. Each of the reviews I used as a clue was carefully selected to ensure that the score given by the review was an integer (so, a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5), AND so that if you look at that letter in the beer name in the order the clues were given, it would spell out RubThisBBQ. Close enough to be pretty recognizable, I think.

For example, first clue and second clue:

• 2015-09-24: 2beerdogs reviewed Alewerks Brewing Company - Bourbon Barrel Porter (BBP), from USA: Virginia, rating it 4 (rDev=-6.3%)
• 2014-09-27: superspak reviewed Stillwater Artisanal Ales - Débutante, from USA: Maryland, rating it 4 (rDev=4.2%)

@2beerdogs gave Bourbon Barrel Porter a 4. The fourth letter of "Bourbon Barrel Porter" is "r". Incidentally, this clue alone narrows it down to three people. @superspak gave Debutante a 4, and the fourth letter of Debutante is "u". And that was enough to uniquely identify my target. The rest of the clues were provided to allow a pattern to actually become noticeable. All the unnecessary information was provided as a smokescreen.

I hoped that "only round number scores" would draw attention to that number, and just left it up to luck and perseverance for people to try the right thing on the right info.

I knew there was a substantial chance no one would figure it out, so I was delighted when @Beersnake1 did. I'm curious about that journey.

After coming up with the idea, I had to find the right reviews (and verify that the right reviews existed), which was by far the hardest part.