Beer Analytics: Review of Heady Topper Descriptors

Heady Topper, brewed by The Alchemist in Waterbury, VT is ranked #1 on BeerAdvocate and BeerGraphs and has an overall score of 100 on RateBeer. Clearly, this beer doesn’t suck.

To take advantage of the enormous amount of data collected by the top review beer sites, I decided to find out how the majority of tasters describe the beer and its ingredients. To do this, I pulled and analyzed all of the available 2,874 reviews from RateBeer and BeerAdvocate for Heady Topper to find out what the consensus descriptors are. I adjusted the results to account for only those repeated words in the reviews that actually describe the beer. I didn’t anticipate the enormous bank of misspelled words, so I also adjusted the results to include any spelling variation of a descriptor, if I could tell what the reviewer was trying to spell then I counted it.

To help use the results to put descriptors to actual ingredients used, I compared the top descriptors to both the hops and malts used in the beer. I used what appears to be the general consensus ingredients for Heady Topper. Left off the charts below is any mention of the Conan yeast strain used to ferment Heady Topper. Famous for its distinct peach aroma, I expected this descriptor to rank much higher than 13th.

Source: BeerAdvocate and BeerGraphs

Data Collection Tool: Kimonolabs

Bonus Stat:

Out of the 2,874 reviews of Heady Topper analyzed, there were 1,049 mentions of some form of the word “love.”