Selecting the next beer is sometimes a tricky task. Many folks jump for old favorites, while some craft beer enthusiasts enjoy being adventurers, seeking out new tastes and new styles when they talk to local beer sellers. Sometimes, that hunt turns faulty, and an enthusiast may wind up with a less than the ideal beer for their tastes.
According to Food Beast, a few students at Stanford have decided that that this sometimes injurious process could be easily rectified with a new system designed in the style of popular internet radio program Pandora. Beer Viz will offer beer suggestions to the user based off of their own personal preferences. The program will allow consumers to find and sort beers based on appearance, taste, and aroma. The chart will be able to separate beer based on color, flavor and style, and may lead you down roads from beers you like to beers you love.
The program pulls data from the popular beer reviewing site Beer Advocate, which houses reviews and flavor profiles of beers posted by craft beer enthusiasts. The goal of BeerViz is to create a program that will make it easier to track down beers you wouldn't have tried if they hadn't been suggested.
The current program is still in development stages, and the website uses technology similar to Pandora's taste profile design which builds you a beer preference profile, based on your ratings of prior selections.