A practical field guide to data visualization for the drinks industry: one article per chart type, each with two or three concrete beer-industry use cases, so you can match the chart to the question instead of defaulting to whatever your tool drew first. No hype — where a chart is the wrong choice, I say so.
The charts, one article each
Comparison & composition
- Bar Chart — comparing values across categories (styles, SKUs, accounts).
- Grouped (Clustered) Bar Chart — comparing several series side by side (this year vs last, plan vs actual).
- Stacked Bar Chart — composition within each category (channel mix, cost build-up).
- Pie & Donut Chart — share of a single whole, used sparingly.
- Treemap — composition with many parts and a hierarchy.
Trends over time
- Line Chart — trends and trajectories over time.
- Combo (Line + Bar) Chart — two metrics on two axes (volume + margin %).
- Area & Stacked Area Chart — cumulative totals and shifting composition over time.
Relationships & distributions
- Scatter Plot — relationship between two variables.
- Bubble Chart — three variables at once.
- Histogram — the distribution of one variable.
- Box & Whisker Plot — spread, medians and outliers across groups.
Two dimensions at once
- Heat Map — intensity across two categories (hour × day, style × month).
Already covered in depth
These chart types have their own dedicated posts in the Seeing Your Beer series:
- Radar / profile chart → True-to-Target tasting
- CUSUM / EWMA / control charts → SPC that catches drift
- Trajectories & small multiples → Shelf-life visualization
- Sankey diagram → The brewhouse balance
Every post in this guide is tagged #beer-chart-guide. New to dashboards? Start with Beyond the Control Chart.