Hops, Skip and a Jump: The Regional Uniqueness of Beer Styles

Perhaps more than any other product, beer evokes its place of origin. Part of what makes every pint of Guinness or stein of Paulaner so memorable is what sets them apart and gives them their unique "taste of place." This chapter explores the geographical differentiation of beer. To do so, we collect data on regional beer recipes, styles, and ingredients from a homebrewing website. We then employ Evolutionary Economic Geography (EEG) methods and create weighted co-occurrence networks for the ingredients within each style. We use these networks to identify which ingredients are most important to each beer style, measure a style’s robustness, and compare differences between geographically close and distant styles. While previous literature focuses on the related diversification of regions, we use these methods to examine the differences within the same product and across many regional styles and flavours. Combining the EEG methods with this unique ingredients dataset, we show that almost all beer styles rely on only a handful of key ingredients. Yet some regional beers are more robust than others due to readily available substitute ingredients in their region. Likewise, we demonstrate that styles originating in close geographic proximity are more similar in their use of ingredients.