Pandas and Beer

For the first time since its inception in 1982, the Great American Beer Festival has been canceled, in turn, replaced by an opportunity for a lonely pub crawl. Digital passports were handed out, and "attendees" got their first looks at the available breweries in their area:

Now, that view is all well and good. Provides the needed information, along with directions or a website a user could peruse to find beers that can quench their unshakeable thirst during this pandemic.

What is it missing? Python. And Pandas.

After scraping (may write a future post) the data into a CSV, I had a collection separated by three columns: Brewery name, Location (city/state), and Deal.

As always, the first step is to import all of that and turn it into a DataFrame:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv("breweries.csv")

pd.set_option("max_colwidth", None)

The set_option was an important addition. Otherwise, crucial information would be cut off in the limited column width.

1) Find all breweries in a city

This required a simple column lookup via location:

denver_breweries = df.loc[df["Location"] == "Denver, Colorado"]

This got me a better view of the possibilities around me:

2) Find breweries according to deals

Now, what if I wasn't alone on my boozy adventures? What if I actually had friends that wanted to see me? This is when a Buy One - Get One Free deal would come in handy. I could search by substrings within the Deal column.

def find_bogo_deals(brew_list):    
    new_df = brew_list[brew_list['Deal'].str.contains("BOGO") | brew_list['Deal'].str.contains("buy one, get one", case=False)]
    df = pd.DataFrame(new_df)
    return df

find_bogo_deals(denver_breweries)

I declared the variable denver_breweries at the beginning of the notebook

Now, we are cooking with fire!

But what if we wanted the good stuff? Those special releases that have been brewed and barrel-aged since last year, in anticipation for the fall of 2020. Then we would just change up our substring filter using regex.

import re

def find_specials(brew_list):

    special_list = ["special", "exclusive", "special release"]

    esc_lst = [re.escape(s) for s in special_list]   

    spec_pattern = '|'.join(esc_lst)

    new_df = brew_list[brew_list['Deal'].str.contains(spec_pattern, case=False)]    

    df = pd.DataFrame(new_df)

    return df


find_specials(denver_breweries)

Excellent! This list should ensure that I won't be driving.

Obviously, we could do a lot more manipulation here: splitting up location to be City - State; cleaning up the text in the Deal column to remove newlines; even exporting that CSV into a SQL database to play around some more.

In any case, I hope this post inspired you to break out your notebooks and apply Python & Pandas to your everyday life. GABF deals end October 17th (this Saturday), so don your mask and get out there to support your local breweries in these trying times.