Most brewery dashboards stop at the line chart and the control chart — which answer “what’s the trend” and “are we in spec” and little else. This 5-part series is about the other questions a brewery asks constantly, and the underused visualizations that answer them well: does this batch still taste like the brand, is a value slowly drifting, how does flavour age, and where do extract, water and energy go.
No hype, as always. Each chart earns its place against a specific brewing question — and where a plain line chart is still the right answer, I’ll say so.
The series
- Beyond the Control Chart: Data Visualizations Brewers Underuse — the opener: matching the chart to the brewing question instead of defaulting to the line.
- True-to-Target: Visualizing Whether a Batch Matches Its Brand Profile — radar profiles against a target band, deviation charts and brand-conformance trends.
- SPC That Actually Catches Drift: Capability, CUSUM and EWMA — the SPC the basic control chart misses, for the slow drift brewing actually suffers.
- Shelf-Life Trajectories: Visualizing Forced-Ageing and Flavour Stability — staling as a path, with trajectories and small multiples on shared axes.
- Where Your Extract, Water and Energy Go: Sankey and the Brewhouse Balance — the whole mass and energy balance in one picture, with the widest loss band pointing where to act.
Read them in order, or jump to the chart you need. Every post in the series is tagged #brewing-data-viz.
For the wider production context, see the Brewing Science & AI track; for the build skills behind these dashboards, The Brewer’s AI Roadmap.