GABF Heat Map

Yup, works now. Thanks for posting this, very cool.

 

After looking at the GIF, I thought, "it must suck to live in the Dakotas". At least the Arkansas and Mississippi area improved in the past few years.

 

What an interesting, concise history of craft beer, geographically speaking. Demonstrates the shifting trendy areas and mainstays. The staying power of Colorado jumps out, though that may be due to the GABF being held there.

I contend that it solidifies the rise of SoCal as the "best" area for craft today though

 

Not many states can say Mississippi has surpassed them in anything positive

 

Just wanted to note that the bar is set so high in southern California for breweries that you can't make bad beer and be successful or even survive long term. With so many options, here the mediocre breweries just get skipped over. You gotta have yer shit together and know how to brew yer balls off to open a brewery in San Diego and now Los Angeles.

 

ges

Two things:

1) I think while the prominance of Colorado suggest that certain staying power of Colorado is operating there is also something else definitely going on that proximity won't explain since otherwise there shouldn't be so many oscillations shown in the GIF.

2) While I'd agree that the growth of SoCal over time clearly indicates it is currently an area with lots of activity, the overall heat map doen't support it being the "best," but it might just qualify as being among the best despite it being overshadowed for so long by the Bay area. :-)

BT, if you look at the heat map using Satellite view rather than map view some interesting things are made more visible.

 

Oh, cool. Like what?

 

Not entirely sure yet, need to spend more time with it, but the contrast enhances the colors used to represent medal density and makes visibility clearner, so it is, for example, much more plain that some states could be argued to be beer wastelands based on the scarcity of medals, etc. Perhaps something more interesting after spending more time with it.

 

Good to know. This is the first time I've paid any attention to this particular visualization software and it's looking more and more useful the more I "play" with it.

 

Am I the only who just thinks " wow, there's a lot of terrible beer submitted at GABF." I've had many of the GABF winning beers from the plains states, and a few from other places. They were mostly freaking terrible. That's not specific to this 2015 map, btw.

 

OK, so here's one.

Using satellite view I was looking at areas around PA and NY and realized there was a visible hot spot in Utica, NY. Using the Places database on this site I found that the prime candidate was Matt Brewing Company.

Matt makes a line of beers under the Saranac brand which most everyone thinks of as fairly average and they stand out in many people's mind, if at all, for brewing good sold beers that hit a nice sweet spot for price-quality. They are also known to be a contract brewer for a few other award winning breweries such as Brooklyn brewing, whose medals would count as being from where Brooklyn Brewing is housed.

So I went to the Matt web page and found that under Awards, they list a fairly long history of their Saranac beers medaling in several competitions. It's a list that seems longer than those of some more highly regarded breweries.

So we can say that Matt seems to have a long history of brewing beers that are good exemplars of the style categories used at GABF and other competitions.

 

No, you're not the first person to express that thought, not even the 21st.

 

Let me say what others have, thank you for taking the effort to do this. As a sorta stat geek, this was truly fun to play with.

To some other side conversations, I do recall when we hit GABF back in 2012 thinking about the left-coast bias (volume-wise) in the beers we had. Specifically I recalled thinking, I'm getting to taste a bunch of beers I will likely never get to try again. I think the heat map findings, especially as it pertains to CO/Denver is at least partially influenced by geography.

But so what? Take the data for what it is, and don't try to read more into it (statistics can prove whatever you want depending on what data you select). I like seeing the visualization of the data - and found this a very interesting piece of information to play with. Thanks, yet again @mblock.