Beerspace!

What happens when you combine a hearty appreciation for hops with unhealthy affection for quantitative analyses? The answer is beerspace, an attempt to visualize beer quality and personal tastes via principal components analyses. First, let it be known that many assumptions have been violated (they were pretty drunk, though), including missing data, non-independence among samples, and differing quantification conditions. The results are not too surprising:

24 beers included in the analyses, although only notables are indicated on the graph above. For those wondering where Road Dog Porter falls, forget it. The panel was so polarized against Road Dog it threw everyone into one crowded corner of beerspace. It was deemed an outlier and properly dealt with. Eugenia & Chris are trying their best to be outliers as well...

The "Hop Cluster" is a jumble-muck of many hop-heads. Let's take a closer look:

Not that this focus helped much.

The landscape of this space will surely change with future tastings; additionally, the accuracy of the space representation would be greatly improved by filling in values for missing data. Perhaps we'll have to do more tastings to fill in those holes...

But first, stouts!