index.Rmd

---
title: "Craft Beer Ratings Analysis"
author: "Krishna Kalluri, Chao Pang"
date: "`r Sys.Date()`"
site: bookdown::bookdown_site
editor_options: 
  markdown: 
    wrap: 72
---

# Introduction

Beer is an everyday drink that we are all familiar with, the classic
impression of a beer such as Heineken and Budweiser is that it has a
light body, a refreshing and slightly bitter taste. We believe all of us
share a similar experience where we tried a sip of beer for the first
time and only got disappointed by it. Every since that trauma, the
question would automatically pop up whenever we see other people consume
beer with delight, why would people love it? Beer is normally portrayed
as a cheap, easy to access, and down to the earth type of beverage, it
never received the attention that wine has been enjoying in the past
decades. Both of us felt the same way when we first started drinking
beer it's more of a way to get you into the party mood and sometimes we
would drink for effect rather than the taste. That changed about 5 years
ago when we first got exposed to craft beer and we fell in love with it
immediately, and our craft beer journey started. Before we dive into the
investigation of the craft beer, let us get the definition of craft beer
out of the way first. **Craft beer** is defined as a beer made by a
brewer that is small, independent, and traditional. According to the
[Brewers
Association](https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics-and-data/craft-brewer-definition/)
(BA), an industry group of mostly small, independent brewers, there are
more than 8,000 craft breweries in the U.S. Nearly 4,000 of them opened
between
[2015--2020](https://www.brewersassociation.org/statistics-and-data/national-beer-stats/).
With steady growth in craft beer community, craft brewers started
organizing beer festivals and making craft beers available at multiple
locations, that's when people got to try different styles of beers and
this changed our perception altogether.

Since a few years ago, a few online websites and phone apps were
developed for people to share their experience and knowledge about craft
beers. Specifically, there are a few well-known beer websites that
motivate social drinking such as Untappd and BeerAdvocate (similar to
IMDB), where people could find the information on beers, give their own
ratings to the beers and also leave comments, and this actually
generated a lot of valuable data. For example, the beer apps could
leverage this data for developing beer recommendation systems and
predict what is going to be the next popular beer? Despite the data is
being collected by those organizations and companies, this data is still
publicly available on their websites or through their own API endpoint.

As we both are craft beer enthusiasts and on a mission of drinking the
best craft beers in the US. Due to the sheer large number of breweries
and beers available nowadays, it would be impossible to try every one of
them, therefore we would have to apply some data-driven approach to help
us identify good beers more efficiently. Although "what is a good beer"
is a highly subjective question, there is some census among the beer
geeks in terms of what beer styles are preferred and what beers tend to
get higher ratings.

We have been wanting to conduct some beer analyses to understand the
landscape of the craft beer industry. Doing so will allow us better
understand our own tastes, and enable us to apply a data-driven approach
for beer hunting. And this final project gives us an opportunity to do
just that. In this project, we are going to apply the EDAV techniques to
the beer rating data (will be discussed later in the data source
section) in conjunction with our beer knowledge hopefully, we will gain
some new insights that we didn't previously know. Specifically, we
decided to analyze the beer styles, beer characteristics, regional
origins, and the corresponding ratings given out by users. We have
designed a few starter questions to get us started shown below, however,
as we dive into the data deeper, the questions will definitely go beyond
the scope defined here in the later chapters.

**To formulate the starter questions,**

1.  Where are the breweries located across the US? Which of the states
    have the most breweries?

2.  Is there any correlation between the region of the brewery and the
    user rating?

3.  Do different states tend to brew certain beer styles?

4.  Is there a correlation between beer styles and user ratings? Do
    certain beer styles tend to be rated higher than other styles?

5.  What traits of the beers tend to receive higher ratings?