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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.
Background
Commercial breweries spent countless hours 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 to help build your own recipe and make sure you use winning hop combinations.
What is Hopularity?
Hopularity is a web based app, that provides an interface for interrogating a backend database of breweries, beers, beer styles and the hop combinations used within them.
When we started out with making the app, the main purpose was to provide a list of commercially available beers and the hop combinations used in them. You could then search or filter by one or more hops, and gain insights into what other hops were commonly used in conjunction with these hop(s). The more popular they were, the higher the "hopularity rating" which is an indexed rating between 1-10.
Other Uses for Hopularity
After compiling this data and starting to filter it and looking at the results, we soon discovered plenty of other useful insights that could be gained from this data, such as;
- What commercially available beers use some or all of the hops you filter on
- What hops are most popular or commonly used by a particular brewery
- What hops and hop combinations are most commonly used for a particular beer style
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| A screenshot of the Hopularity app |
We'll provide further in-depth details on each of the screens in Hopularity and how to use them further below in this article.
The Data
The database 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, and only these ones are included in the dataset referenced by Hopularity. A huge thank you to all commercial breweries who made the decision to share this data publicly.
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.
The dataset is also just a snapshot of what breweries are using at a particular point in time, and doesn't account for the fact that breweries often change up their recipes based on consumer preferences, hop availability or any number of other factors. We don't have plans to actively "maintain" or continuously check the data as we just don't have time, but we'd like to think it will keep growing with more additions over time.
Hop Ratios
We also recognise that a program like this doesn't capture hop ratios and when they are added in the beer making process - ie. early in the boil for bittering, later in the boil for flavour or aroma, after the boil in a whirlpool or as a cold-side dry hop addition.
In any case, 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.
App Development and Feedback
We are not a web developer, though we somewhat 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.
How to use Hopularity
Here's some detailed information about how to use each of the screens in Hopularity, what the filters do and how to interpret the results that are displayed.
Hop Explorer
The first page presented when you access Hopularity is the Hop Explorer page. This is where you can select one or multiple hops to see what other companion hops are popular with the selected hop or hop combination, and what commercially available beers contain (at least) all of the hops you have filtered on.
This screen was the original goal of Hopularity when we set out to create it. What we wanted to be able to determine is what other hops are popular (hopular) with particular hop or hop combinations.
- (Optional) - select a country to filter the search to only return results for beers from breweries in the selected country or countries. If no country is selected, then all beers from all countries in the database will be used for the search.
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| Hopularity | Hop Explorer | Country Filter (optional) |
- Select one or more hops from the list of hops to search for.
- You can use the Clear Selections button in the top right corner of this section to clear your selected hop(s).
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| Hopularity | Hop Explorer | Hop Selection filter |
- The Top Companion hops section will now be displayed. This is a list of all hops that have been used in conjunction with all of the selected hops in commercially available beers (listed in the database)
- The companion hops have a Hopularity Rating. The most popular companion hop has a rating of 10.0, and all other hops have a rating based on how many beers they appear in in relation to the most popular companion hop.
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| Hopularity | Hop Explorer | Top Companion Hops & Hopularity Rating |
- Underneath the Top Companion Hops section, a list of Beers Matching Your Selection will be displayed. This is a list of beers in the database that contain all of the hops you selected, plus potentially more.
- The hop(s) you filtered on are highlighted in green for each of the beers returned.
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| Hopularity | Hop Explorer | Beers Matching Your Selection tile |
- Next there is a Style Breakdown which displays a pie chart of the breakdown of beer styles for all the beers returned by the search.
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| Hopularity | Hop Explorer | Style Breakdown Pie Chart |
- Lastly, there is a Country of Origin breakdown that shows a bar chart of the split of what country the filtered beers/breweries are from.
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| Hopularity | Hop Explorer | Country of Origin Breakdown Bar Chart |
Style Explorer
Use the Style Explorer page to view what hops are popular for a particular beer style and/or by a particular country.
- On the Filter by Style and Country section, select a Beer Style and/or a Country of Origin. Note that the Country of Origin refers to the beer/brewery country of origin, not where the hop originated from.
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| Hopularity | Style Explorer | Style and Country filter |
- The Most Popular Hops for this Selection tile will now be displayed which shows in descending order the most popular hops for beers from the selected style and/or country.
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| Hopularity | Style Explorer | Most Popular Hops |
- The Hopularity Rating for the most popular hops works the same as on the Hop Explorer page. The most popular hop has a rating of 10.0, with the rating of all other hops calculated based on how often they appear in relation to the most popular hop.
- The last tile on this page is the Filtered Beers list which is the list of all beers from the selected style and/or country.
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| Hopularity | Style Explorer | Filtered Beers |
Brewery Browser
Wondering what hops are popular or commonly used for a particular brewery? Or want to see what beers are in the database for a particular brewery? Use the Brewery Browser to find out.
- (Optional) - select one or more countries to filter the list of available breweries to search for
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| Hopularity | Brewery Browser | Country Filter |
- Select the Brewery drop down to display a list of all breweries within the database. If a country/countries have been selected, only breweries from those countries will be displayed, otherwise all breweries in the database are displayed to select from.
- After selecting a brewery, a pie chart is displayed showing the breakdown of beer styles within the database for the selected brewery
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| Hopularity | Brewery Browser | Beer Style Breakdown Pie Chart |
- Underneath the pie chart, a list of all the hops used by the brewery within the database are displayed, once again based on Hopularity Rating.
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| Hopularity | Brewery Browser | Most Popular Hops for Brewery |
- The last tile that is displayed is the list of beers within the database for the selected brewery.
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| Hopularity | Brewery Browser | Beers from Selected Brewery |
About
The last screen within Hopularity is the About page which gives an overview of the database.
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| Hopularity | About |
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