Introducing Hopularity - A Beer Hop Analytics Web App

Ever had some left over hops floating around in your freezer or fridge, but you don't have enough to make that hop forward pale ale or IPA you've got on your to-brew list? We have, and the next thing we wonder after this is what other hops would pair really well with this other hop that we have lying around.

Hopularity is our attempt to provide the information to answer this question, based on a database of commercially available beers and the hop combinations that they use.

Commercial breweries spent countless time and dollars on sensory tests to make sure the beers they produce are great, and meet the flavour expectations of their customers. As homebrewers, we of course don't have such resources available, so why not leverage the knowledge that's already out there?

This is of course only a small snapshot of the bigger picture of what hops are used in commercially-brewed beer, but we still feel it gives a really great insight. There's a large number of breweries who don't publish what hops are in their beers, and although this is disappointing and makes putting a database together for an app like this quite challenging, we do understand why they may not want to make this sort of information public.

Thankfully, there are a number of breweries who do share the hop combinations for their beers on their websites, so a huge thank you to all of them.

We also recognise that a program like this doesn't capture hop ratios and when they are added in the beer making process - ie. during the boil, or afterwards as a dry hop, but we still find a point of reference for what hop combinations are popular in the industry to be useful because they obviously work well and take much of the guess work out of what to order and throw in your next batch as a homebrewer.

Trawling the internet for brewery websites and going through them to identify what hops are in what beers is tedious, but we've so far managed to capture over 800 beers across three countries, and we're hoping to grow this to at least 1000 before too long.

We are also not a web developer, though we are a bit proud of how this app has turned out. Feedback is welcome, but we may not be able to implement all suggestions, no matter how great they are but we'd still love to hear your thoughts on whether you found this app useful, simply leave a comment below.

You can access Hopularity via the link below

Link to Hopularity