New Stat

Posted by: Stonecipher

Dec. 2, 2013

This may be for my own personal amusement only, but the geek in me can't help it.  I am a political junky as well as a beer nerd and this stat will combine both, but hopefully it'll be somewhat practical - Electoral Votes for Distribution.

I'll let Wikipedia field your questions about what an Electoral Vote (EV) is, but in our case here at 20 Beers in 20 Nights, they can be used as a very imperfect (and highly flawed), rough estimate of what percentage of the U.S. gets distribution for a particular beer.  Basically, in every Presidential Election each state is assigned a number of Electoral Votes (based on their population, sort of).  So with 538 total EVs, the closer to that number in our "Electoral Votes for Distribution" category, the closer the U.S. is to access for everyone for that particular brewery/beer.

In the past I tried to list every individual state each beer was distributed, but that's pretty time consuming.  This method will allow me a slightly quicker and more efficient way to estimate how many U.S. consumers have direct access to this beer.

Also, in some cases, a brewery will only provide limited distribution to a certain state.  In these cases I'll have two numbers for the category.  The first will be for the number for full distribution states, then in parenthesis I'll have the total number including those states that only have limited distribution.

Hopefully this makes sense.  If not, you can skip it, I'm indulging myself here.