So it came to pass I was at Cloudburst brewing and remarked to another regular that the only way I could remember the beer names and hops within them as well as him would be to scrape the website… so I did. And put it into a graph database so I could visualize the networks of related beers and hops.

The project is still evolving, but the project description and some usage examples are on github. I’ll be keeping the descriptions there more up to date and a bit more formal about installing and running the project, and with more usage examples and queries.

For now, I’m still working/editing on the project and hopefully will return to revise this post, or create a demonstration Youtube video.

That said, at least one epiphany was that I really enjoyed every Cloudburst beer that contains Azacca, even beers of different styles. This realization came from viewing the graph of beers containing Azacca hops, and their styles.

Art Deco, That’s Baseball Baby, and Show Your Work were all excellent beers, and I probably wouldn’t have quite pinned down a connection between them trying to remember years old descriptions or reading through Cloudburst’s webpage list and descriptions of several hundred beers.

All the writing I have time for today, hopefully I’ll revisit this post soon with some more images and examples. Scraping the site for beers loading up a database was decent fun, although getting useful hop descriptions by trying to deconstruct PDF files was not.