When I shared my website with my co-workers, they all asked when would I have brewing stuff on the site. While that will be where I will post most of my home brewing adventures, I wanted to make a chart that was beer related. One of my brewing goals this year is to try and brew my way through Jamil Zainasheff and John Palmer’s book “Brewing Classic Styles“. In the book, each style has the range the major metrics that brewers use to stay in the suggested guidelines (these are based on the 2008 Guidelines, not the 2015). The major KPIs for brewers are Original Gravity, Final Gravity, IBUs, SRM and ABV. Original Gravity is the density of sugar in the wort before yeast is added to eat the sugar to turn into alcohol. The final gravity is density of sugar after the yeast has consumed most of it. IBU is for International Bittering Units and lets the consumer know how hoppy a beer might taste. SRM is a range of color for beer to fall into. ABV is Alcohol by Volume (shown as a percentage) and lets the consumer know how strong a beer is.

I copied all of the “vitals” for each style and put them into a scatter plot because I would be able to show the gravity before fermentation and then after fermentation (that is the original/final gravity) with the color of the style and the percentage of alcohol for each style. One of the things that I learned from this is how dense it is for beers to start with a 1.045 to 1.050 original gravity. However, this does make sense becuase these beers would be around 5% ABV and that is where a lot of beers come in on ABV to be easy drinking beer. This has sparked intrigue to see how the 2015 BJCP Style Guidelines changed but that will be a chart for another day!

Check out my chart here: Scatter Plot – 2008 BJCP Style Guidelines