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BeerViz: The Pandora Of The Beer World

Janelle Cabuco |
March 27, 2014 | 11:43 p.m. PDT

Associate Food Editor

 The container you drink out of affects the taste of your beer (Michelle Tribe / Flickr Creative Commons).
The container you drink out of affects the taste of your beer (Michelle Tribe / Flickr Creative Commons).
A new interactive website, created by a few Stanford students, called BeerViz offers users with beer suggestions based off of their own personal preferences, much like how Pandora suggests music. BeerViz asks users a series of questions involving their beer preferences, such as their preferred beer strength, appearance, taste and aroma, and recommends beer selections accordingly.

The goal of BeerViz is to suggest beers that users might not have tried otherwise. BeerViz targets a wide range of beer drinkers, from social beer drinkers to novices and experts. 

Stanford students created BeerViz using Beer Advocate's dataset, which consisted of 1.5 million beer reviews documented from 1998 to 2011. However, to reflect timely and most recent user feedback, Stanford students only used useful data from 2009 to 2012. Each review rated each beer's appearance, aroma, palate, taste and overall impression with values between one to five. 

Need a new beer recommendation? Let BeerViz do all the work (@firstwefeast / Twitter).
Need a new beer recommendation? Let BeerViz do all the work (@firstwefeast / Twitter).
BeerViz's interactive map allows users to explore beers similar to their preferred taste. The map's chord layout and hierarchical clustering make it easy to navigate around the variety of beer selections. All users have to do is hover their mouse over their preferred beer selection to see lines appear; these lines will highlight and connect them to beer selections BeerViz believes they might also enjoy. For example, if a user is looking for a beer that tastes like Hennepin, BeerViz will suggest her to try Saison du BUFF. 

Additionally, when hovering over each selection, a box will pop up explaining that selection's style, alcohol by volume rating, and an average rating of the drink. 

Reach Associate Food Editor Janelle Cabuco here



 

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