Meet the data-driven NEIPA

The first fully data-driven beer is here. Uiltje Brewing Company and Data Science Lab have worked together to develop the perfect – data-driven – New England India Pale Ale.

Beer is often brewed on instinct, drawing on a brewer’s knowledge and skill, and sometimes a little luck. Not this unique collaboration: the Data Driven NEIPA.
Using web scraping, we extracted characteristics from beer review tasting notes, including those on the large consumer platform Untappd. We then coded these characteristics into categories such as beer style, average rating, hop flavours and aromas, bitterness, sweetness, caramel and types of fruit. The resulting dataset was used to build a model to determine the ideal flavour combination. It was not about finding the highest-scoring characteristic, but about balance. We shared the results with Uiltje’s brewers, who turned them into a recipe derived entirely from this data analysis. The right combinations and proportions take this NEIPA to another level.

Uiltje Brewing Company and Data Science Lab are two young companies. Unsurprisingly, they met over Friday afternoon drinks. That spontaneous, sociable afternoon planted the seed of an experiment between brewers and data scientists. As we now know, it grew into something remarkable in terms of flavour: the ultimate beer was born.

Don’t wait any longer: taste hard numbers & smooth flavours. Computer says Go!