I've been working a lot lately on firming up the first 10 beers I plan to brew at Elusive, drawing from what is quite a large collection of recipes. This got me thinking about market research and ascertaining how well these beers might be received. Although that's not necessarily an indicator of potential sales, I figured it might provide useful input into developing an overall strategy. In an increasingly crowded market, simply starting up and hoping for the best is a risky approach. There's no longer a 'build it and they will come' road to market. Whilst you might shift your first few batches out of curiosity, if they aren't well received at point of sale, it'll get tougher from there.





Like many beer drinkers, I use Untappd (when I remember!) to record the beers I've drunk and give a rating. Personally, it's mostly used as an aide memoire but others like the gamification aspect of collecting badges and the other social features it provides. Untappd is a great source of data, although compared to sites such as ratebeer , the data is perhaps less 'clean' given the comparative lack of moderation - for example, if the first drinker of a specific new beer adds it in the wrong style category, it may never get changed. With that in mind, the analysis here should not be considered useful for anything more than satisfying my curiosity! There were some other boundaries I set when analysing this data:





A style would be discounted if there were fewer than five beers listed

Data would not be 'cleaned' at all

Since Untappd breaks down by country, I'd focus just on England

Overseas rates of English beers would be included (don't know how to exclude them)





Before we get into the data and findings, it's useful to have a read of Untappd's explanation how scores are determined . The first thing I looked at was the top rated breweries. This is readily available in the user interface:









There are a couple of standouts (for me) here - the first being Hanlons and the second being Samuel Smith's. Hanlons used to brew the much sought after Thomas Hardy's ale. A quick look at their ratings shows this is a common and inevitably highly rated check in, mostly from overseas. Is this driven by scarcity? Possibly. Sam Smith's stands out because of the huge number of ratings. Again, this appears to be due to a strong overseas influence. On to the top 15 rated beers overall, we see a pattern starting to emerge:









If we discount our Sam Smith's outlier, these are mostly strong beers. There's not a huge delta in the number of ratings (relative to the outlier) but the average ABV is just under 10%. This got me thinking about skew by style. That is, if you look at the top rated beers by style, how much variance is there in the average. The graph below (click to expand) shows that skew. It was created by taking the top 5 beers in each style and averaging the scores, then comparing that to the overall average across them all, which was a score of 3.70.









Here we can see a very positive skew towards the 'big' Stouts and IPAs, as reflected in the overall highest rated beers. In analysing the data to create the above graph, I noticed that in some cases there was also a large(r) delta within the styles too. That is, the top rated beer by style was varying degrees higher than the average of the top 5. Those were often the least popular styles (e.g. Cream Ale) but in some cases were also popular, suggesting an 'opportunity' to score relatively well (because of the positive skew) compared to brewing a beer with a lower overall average across the top beers in style. I can't think of a way to show this graphically but these styles stand out as 'opportunity' styles:

Imperial Stout

Milk Stout

Strong Ale (English)

Porter (English)

Mild (English)

Red Ale (American Amber/Red/Imperial) At the other end of the scale, these styles could be considered 'opportunity' styles for other reasons, because they skew lower but have variance within the style, suggesting that attaining a high score relative to other beers in the style might be easier compared to the other end of the scale: