Novel Beer Tasting 2014

I joined a small committee at work called Novel this year and have been looking forward to organizing the second anniversary of our beer tasting event.

Last year's event was excellent and included a local beer guru as the guest speaker and a brewing demonstration by the Swedes. The presenter this year was a long-haired hippy from the Cascade Brewers Society and the Swedes provided some delicious homebrew for us to enjoy after we had worked our way through the commercial beers.

Even though 50 people attended the event it was relatively inexpensive (the budget was only $1340 (8000 NOK) and that included snacks).

Anders provided several of these little piggies filled with his brown ale. He is single-handedly getting people here addicted to homebrew. One of my other colleagues recently purchased a cooler-based homebrew setup and another is considering starting a brew crew with a few of his friends.

The night's presenters: I tried to keep everyone drinking in the same direction while Becca was on her feet keeping glasses filled, making popcorn, and collecting empty bottles.

Purchasing beer and snacks for 50 people and dragging it to work in shopping carts is kind of fun. Returning the empty bottles when there is several inches of snow on the ground is less fun.

The most difficult part, however, was selecting the beers for the event. I couldn't rely on getting beers that I know because Norway's alcohol monopoly makes custom ordering beers very complicated. And I couldn't do anything too technical because I was expecting that many of the people in attendance wouldn't even know the difference between a lager and an ale.

Then I realized that if I was stuck with the beers that the monopoly has selected then so are my coworkers. So I decided to inspect the monopoly's selection and base my presentation on whatever interesting things I could find. I used Python to scrape information (price, ABV, what each store has in stock, etc) from the monopoly's website and then find the rating for each beer on Ratebeer.

Then I created a handful of heuristics that I could use to sort the beers and added the ability to filter by price, location, stock, etc. It only took a weekend to write the code but I spent several weeknights interpreting the data.

For example, here is how I generated two top-ten lists that only include beers that I can purchase at least 5.3L of from the closest store. The first list ranks beer by their alcohol-per-kroner (APK) and also considers ratings. The second list is based on price-per-liter (PPL) and also considers ratings.

My advice to you: grab some data, install python-matplotlib, and start making yourself some 8x10 color glossy photographs. Here are a few that I presented.

The monopoly clearly plays favorites.

Beer is extremely expensive in Norway. According to this histogram you can expect to pay about $25 (150 NOK) per liter.

This scatter plot shows that even though you are paying $25 (150 NOK) per liter there is no guarantee that you are going to get a good beer. Once you get to $33 (200 NOK) per liter, however, it's mostly clear sailing.

Seriously, don't buy a Danish beer without checking its rating first.

When it was time to purchase beers I used the APK-Rating heuristic to select 9 strong beers for us to try:

• Abbaye des Rocs Bruin
• Chimay Trappist Blue 2011
• Young's Special London Ale
• Weihenstephaner Vitus Weizenbock
• St. Peters Cream Stout
• Nómada Royal Porter A La Taza
• Haandbryggeriet Dark Force
• Nøgne Ø #100
• Nøgne Ø #500

We also had a bonus beer, Paulaner Hefe-Weissbier, because it showed up as a top result almost regardless of the heuristic being used (it is excellent and relatively cheap).

I started the presentation at 7:15pm by handing out BJCP score cards so people could have an idea of what they should be considering with each beer. I also handed out some charts and graphs so we would have something fun to talk about while we got started. After each beer was served I talked them through the beer's BJCP style guidelines and then everyone talked amongst themselves until we were ready for the next beer. By the time the commercial beer was gone the homebrew was ready to be served and we gladly drank that while everyone mingled. Becca and I left the party around 2am. We got a text from someone that left around 4am and he said that people were still there. Great success.

If you made it this far in the post then you deserve this photo of a beefcake drinking homebrew.