Larry Koestler

It was a very good year.

A year ago I manually compiled a ridiculous amount of data to analyze my craft beer drinking habits and also celebrate the enjoyment I have derived from the ability to log every beer I consume thanks to Untappd. Sunday, April 28, 2013, marked two years since I logged my very first beer into Untappd, and 1,887 total check-ins and 1,252 uniques later, I finally signed up to become an Untappd supporter so I could own my data.

As such, I present to you in chart form some highlights from the two years I’ve spent enjoying some of the greatest beer in the world:

Three Floyds wins by a landslide; may have had something to do with the fact that I shipped three cases of FFF beer to myself in NYC from Chicago this past winter. I seldom choose Brooklyn these days; a lot of that tally was built during my first few months on Untappd before I started branching further out. Same goes for Dogfish Head, a brewery at one time I greatly admired but who I now feel has been surpassed by a great many. And Stone and Sierra Nevada round out the top five, which makes sense to me as they are arguably the top two “large” craft brewers in the business, although Lagunitas is very much in that conversation as well. I don’t have a set definition for “large,” for these purposes I guess I would define large as a brewery in the Brewers Association’s Top 15.

At this time last year, I had consumed beers brewed in 31 out of 50 states. I managed to knock nine more states (and Washington, DC) off the list, and so the only states I still have yet to drink a beer from are Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee and West Virginia.

American IPAs made up 22% of all beers consumed, followed by 15% for DIPAs and 11% for American Pale Ales. There are a lot of  ”0%” entries in that chart, but in most cases it means I only had a handful of a given style, but it was a small enough amount that it rounded down to zero.

My obsession with Zombie Dust ensured that it would overtake Brooklyn Lager as my most-consumed. Two other beers have remained in the top six since last year — Ruination and 90-Minute IPA, although that is more due to the fact that I was on an insane mission of seeking uniques out for much of the year rather than substantial consumption of either.

My Top-Rated Beers, or the 33 out of 1,252 (3%) that have merited a rating of 5 out of 5

Further breaking down last week’s lists, here are the unweighted Beer Advocate user rankings for Texas’ top-rated DIPAs, IPAs and APAs (for methodology click on aforelinked text):

Further breaking down last week’s lists, here are the unweighted Beer Advocate user rankings for New York State’s top-rated DIPAs, IPAs and APAs (for methodology click on aforelinked text):

c/o http://www.southernbeermag.com

As something of a follow-up to my “The Top-Rated Beer Advocate Beers by State” blog post from last July, and because I find the beer ranking process simultaneously fascinating and vexing (my reaction toward a given beer seems to mostly line up with those that take the time to write lengthy reviews on Beer Advocate; though there are some instances where I find them to be way off) — not to mention the fact that, like many a beer obsessive, I enjoy tracking down beers I can’t regularly obtain and crossing so-called whales off my proverbial list — I decided to cull BA’s freely available data and create three separate spreadsheets detailing what the highest-rated American Double/Imperial IPAs, American IPAs and American Pale Ales (APAs) for every state in the country. Why these styles? Because they’re the three I gravitate toward most frequently. In this third and final part we’ll look at American Pale Ales.

For Part 1 on American Double/Imperial IPAs, click here, and for Part 2 on American IPAs, click here.

To help limit some of the heft of this project, I decided on arbitrary cutoffs for each category — DIPAs had to have a minimum of 15 reviews; IPAs a minimum of 25; and APAs a minimum of 20, giving us overall data sets of 432, 602 and 454, respectively. Bear in mind that BA’s data is ever-evolving, and it’s very likely that by the time you read this certain beers that may be “missing” (for example, I was surprised that Peekskill Brewery’s delicious Shotgun Willy IPA didn’t show up anywhere in New York State’s Top IPAs, as it’s 4.24 rAvg would have made it the second-highest-rated IPA in the state behind Ithaca’s Flower Power IPA, but only seven people have reviewed it thus far. Assuming continued favorable reviews, it seems likely that it will take its rightful place as one of the best-regarded IPAs in the state in due time. Fun fact: Peekskill’s brewmaster is Jeff O’Neill, formerly of Ithaca) will have received enough reviews to push them over my arbitrary thresholds, and so at some point it may make sense to return to this project and reassess — consider this more of a snapshot of what’s going on at this exact moment. Another caveat is the fact that all of the ratings (rAvg) are unweighted, which is why the data I have doesn’t line up exactly with Beer Advocate’s properly weighted “Top Beers’” lists. And also keep in mind that not every state will necessarily be represented in these lists, and that certain states (cough cough California cough) will be substantially better represented than others.

And with that out of the way, here are the top-rated (unweighted, minimum 20 reviews) American Pale Ales by state:

photo c/o http://www.thefullpint.com

As something of a follow-up to my “The Top-Rated Beer Advocate Beers by State” blog post from last July, and because I find the beer ranking process simultaneously fascinating and vexing (my reaction toward a given beer seems to mostly line up with those that take the time to write lengthy reviews on Beer Advocate; though there are some instances where I find them to be way off) — not to mention the fact that, like many a beer obsessive, I enjoy tracking down beers I can’t regularly obtain and crossing so-called whales off my proverbial list — I decided to cull BA’s freely available data and create three separate spreadsheets detailing what the highest-rated American Double/Imperial IPAs, American IPAs and American Pale Ales (APAs) for every state in the country. Why these styles? Because they’re the three I gravitate toward most frequently. In this second part we’ll look at American IPAs.

For Part 1 on American Double/Imperial IPAs, click here.

To help limit some of the heft of this project, I decided on arbitrary cutoffs for each category — DIPAs had to have a minimum of 15 reviews; IPAs a minimum of 25; and APAs a minimum of 20, giving us overall data sets of 432, 602 and 454, respectively. Bear in mind that BA’s data is ever-evolving, and it’s very likely that by the time you read this certain beers that may be “missing” (for example, I was surprised that Peekskill Brewery’s delicious Shotgun Willy IPA didn’t show up anywhere in New York State’s Top IPAs, as it’s 4.24 rAvg would have made it the second-highest-rated IPA in the state behind Ithaca’s Flower Power IPA, but only seven people have reviewed it thus far. Assuming continued favorable reviews, it seems likely that it will take its rightful place as one of the best-regarded IPAs in the state in due time. Fun fact: Peekskill’s brewmaster is Jeff O’Neill, formerly of Ithaca) will have received enough reviews to push them over my arbitrary thresholds, and so at some point it may make sense to return to this project and reassess — consider this more of a snapshot of what’s going on at this exact moment. Another caveat is the fact that all of the ratings (rAvg) are unweighted, which is why the data I have doesn’t line up exactly with Beer Advocate’s properly weighted “Top Beers’” lists. And also keep in mind that not every state will necessarily be represented in these lists, and that certain states (cough cough California cough) will be substantially better represented than others.

And with that out of the way, here are the top-rated (unweighted, minimum 25 reviews) American IPAs by state: