Beer Styles

[A Dokus Recipe]

From Fred Eckhardt (1989), to Charlie Papazian (1994, to Ray Daniels (1996 original edition), to BJCP... all I have found about beer styles are vital stats and words, words and more words. Has anyone ever tried to cluster beer styles? Has anyone ever tried to map beer styles? Does anyone know about self-organizing maps? Would anyone wish there is a better way of mapping (visualizing) beer styles?

[Mesa Maltworks]

I have seen both in tee-shirt and poster form, a family tree of beer styles. Now... I can't remember where to get them ! Virtually every beer festival or competiton I participate or judge in is attended by someone wearing one of these tee-shirts (or should it be "tree-shirts"?) Anyone else seen these?

[A Dokus Recipe]

Was the "tree based" on history? (let me know when you remember who produced this poster...)

My question was really whether anyone had done some serious work with mathematical algorithms to classify beer ?

[andytv]

I started generating org charts for different beer types, but the last 15 tasted the same.

[A Dokus Recipe]

Would you be willing to share these ? If so we could persue this offline if you like(send e:mail to gdeboeck@erols.com. Thanks.

[Freon12]

I don't know if this helps but, I saw a chart grouping beers by style at www.beerhunter.com\styles.html

[entguy]

Looks like Brown & Clapperton & Piggott did the seminal work in this area back in the '70s -- MDS & PCA analysis of beer flavor profiles. See J. Inst. Brewing 84 p. 324 & p 318, #85 - p. 271, as per cited in Hough Briggs Stephens & Young "Malting and Brewing Science"

I bet http://www.scisoc.org/asbc/Journal/pdfs ... 12-01R.pdf
would put you off on a nice start Seibart "Chemometrics in Brewing - a Review" as of 2001. I did a search on "principal components" via http://www.scisoc.org/asbc/Journal/asbcjournquery.asp and ended up with 19 hits, some sensory analysis, some not. "sensory analysis" works well there as an alternative search term, top hit being "Multivariate Modeling of Sensory and Chemical Data to Understand Staling in Light Beer."

I hope this helps. It certainly was fun for me; nice to know I'm not the only statistically oriented beergeek on the planet Keep me informed of your progress please -- plato@avalon.net