We’ve got a friend who runs a very successful brewery, here in Atlanta. He’s a fantastic businessman and, by his own admission, not a data guy per se.

But he knows there’s something there, that will probably help his company do even better than it already is.

That’s why he’s asked us to come and have a look at their beer + data and (as you probably expect, or anyone working with a distributor will know) it looks a lot like what we’ve seen from within the wine world.

The shape of data varies by source and by the way it’s been developed, of course, but here’s what it all has in common: at its root, we’re talking about zeroes and ones.

This more recent experience with beer data reminds me of a few conversations we had shortly after we launched Enolytics three years ago.

One was about spirits – gin, specifically – and whether or not what we’re doing with data for wine can also be applied to data for spirits.

[The answer is Yes.]

The second conversation was with Wine-Searcher.com, when we were talking about wine data and I asked them if they happened to know of a similar large-footprint source for beer.

“We do know of a fantastic source for beer, and cider also,” they said.

“Is it similar to Wine-Searcher?” I asked.

“It IS Wine-Searcher,” they said. Not a lot of people know this, they explained, but Wine-Searcher has long been tracking spirits, beer and cider the same way they track wine. It’s just that the site isn’t called Spirits-Searcher or Beer-Searcher or Cider-Searcher, so it gets a lot less attention.

“Hmm,” we said. 

To venture beyond wine, we’d need to source some new data sources that are specific to beer and spirits, of course. But data from other partners that we already have will become even more useful – such as alcohol delivery services where beer and spirits, just like wine, are all products and SKUs on the same par.

Candidly, this is another direction that we didn’t anticipate when we started this business. It’s also another example of the applications that are possible when your foundation (that is, the skills in the analysis and interpretation of data) are rock solid.

Let’s keep building, and keep making this industry smarter.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Cathy