The Data

As a follow up to my previous Beerlytics posts, I wanted to take a look at what beers are actually on tap at the various bars in a particular city. Unfortunately, this information isn’t readily available for most cities. Philadelphia, however, has a wonderful website called PhillyTapFinder, which shows you all the beers on tap at all the bars in Philadelphia. This shows that Philadelphia has 1916 craft taps spread across 112 bars, with 795 unique craft beers on tap. I made good use of this, scraping all the information from the site and then cross-referencing it with data from RateBeer, which provides information on beer ratings, ABV, IBU, Style, etc.

Before I go into the analysis, a few caveats:

1. All the information I’ve gathered is based on taplists, so bottles are not counted. Thus the incredibly impressive and extensive bottle lists of places like Monk’s Cafe are completely ignored. Sad.
2. Philly Tap Finder only seems to include craft beer. This in and of itself shouldn’t be terribly surprising, but it means that beers like Miller Lite won’t show up anywhere on the lists, despite the fact that Miller is probably on tap at a large number of the examined bars. Low-craft beers like Stella, Hoegarden, and Shocktop are included.
3. I don’t have any price information. If you want to find the cheapest place to get drunk, you’re out of luck.
4. I only have information from a single time slice (in October 2014), so I have no data on tap turnover. In the future I’ll hopefully be able to repeat my scraping over regular intervals to get that kind of information.

The Lists

I’ve organized my findings into a set of top- and bottom-ten lists.

The Best and The Worst

First things first, which bars have the best beer in Philadelphia? Which have worst? To find out, I looked at the taplists for each bar in Philadelphia. For each beer in that taplist, I got the average rating for that beer on ratebeer. I then calculated the average average-beer-rating for each bar. (Remember, macro-brews are not included in these averages) Using this methodology, the top ten beer bars are…

And the bottom ten are…

I’m not surprised at all to see Monks Cafe or Tria on the list of the top ten. However, there are several on the list I’m not familiar with. All the more reason to go back to Philadelphia! On the other side of the coin, I’ve never heard of “Tatooed Mom” or “Misconduct”, but I can’t say the names inspired any great confidence. I know you shouldn’t judge a bar by it’s cover, but… Tatooed Mom? Really? Looking at Tatooed Mom’s webpage reveals that they claim to have the “the best local and regional beer”. While they do have a few good beers on tap, their smallish taplist is padded out with the likes of Shocktop and Newcastle. Okay, enough picking on Tatooed Mom.

The Most and The Least

So we know who has the best curated beer list. Who has the longest? Sometimes size matters. Keep in mind that only taplists were counted, and not bottle lists. This means that powerhouses like Monk’s Cafe aren’t going to show up, despite the incredible selection afforded by their bottle list. Remember as well that only craft taps are included.
The top 10…

The bottom ten…

While none of the bars with the most taps appear on the top- or bottom-rated lists, several of the bars with the fewest taps appear on the top-rated list, and one appears on the bottom-rated list.

Variety of Styles

You’ll notice that the bar with the most taps (City Taphouse) appears nowhere on the first list. While it has 54 taps, those taps only represent 15 different styles of beer. Which I find just a little disappointing.

Popularity of Styles

This leads to the next category: popularity of styles. Which styles are the most common? I won’t bother listing the least common, as there a very large number of styles with no examples on tap anywhere in the city. For example, any kind of Sake. Here are the most common categories.

For more detail, consult the following interactive chart (Hyper-categories are determined using the Ratebeer style guide, chart designed using Sunburst ):

Some of these results genuinely surprised me. Keep in mind this data was gathered in October, so pumpkin and Oktoberfest beers were in full force, as were ciders. That being said, I didn’t think that the effects would have been quite so prominent.

Most Common Beers

Seeing how popular pumpkin beers were, for example, made me wonder exactly which beers were the most common overall. Would it be more pumpkin beers? Well, they’re certaintly up there:

Here we see some standards: Yuengling (it’s Philly after all), Guinness, and some other local brews (i.e., Yards). Then there are some seasonal beers: Pumking and Punkin. I hope Allagash White is just seasonally popular, but honestly it’s such a preferable choice to Blue Moon or Shocktop that I’m not terribly upset. I am curious why the Pivo Pils and the two Founders beers happen to be so commonly stocked. They’re great beers, but I’m still a little curious why those particular beers are so popular over, say, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

Unique Beers

Finally, I decided to look at what bars had beers you couldn’t get anywhere else in Philadelphia. Specifically, by percentage of taps and by number of taps. First, by percentage:

Things to note: Nodding head is a brewpub: they have such a high percentage of unique beers because they brew their own stuff. But, as far as I know, the other bars just have high percentages because they’re well-curated… well… The Victoria Freehouse has 45% unique beers, but they have the second lowest average average-beer-rating. So you know where to go if you want low-rated beer you can’t find anywhere else! Actually, that’s not entirely fair. The real truth is they fancy themselves something of an English pub, and thus stock plenty of hard-to-find beers from the British Isles. This is a cool idea, but unfortunately a lot of British beer isn’t terribly well rated as it tends to be rather weak and, well, uninteresting. That being said, they actually have some pretty good roses among their thorns, including several beers from J.W. Lees and Innis & Gunn. I guess that means you can’t judge a bar by it’s average rating. So much for this post!

Looking at number of unique taps tells a slightly different story. This isn’t terribly surprising: if you have enough taps, hopefully you work some unique beers into the mix.

For Next Time

And that wraps up Part One of my analysis! I’ve got lots of cool ideas for further analysis (fueled by reader suggestions) but haven’t had time to look into them yet. For next time, I’ll hopefully be able to look into:

• Average ABV by bar
• Average IBU by bar
• Average average-beer-rating using /within-style rankings/
• Bars with the most local vs. domestic vs. foreign beer.
• Maps, Maps, Maps!