Whiskey!

I’m a fan of whiskey. I wanted to practice my web scraping so I took all of the 90+ rated whiskeys off of the Whiskey Advocate and mashed it up with LCBO Price data. The figure below lets you explore all of the 90+ rated whiskeys the LCBO stocks: scroll over points to see details, and click and drag with your mouse to zoom in on a particular area of the chart. Whiskey types are color-coded, and you can select and de-select specfic types using the legend at the bottom of the figure.

Another interesting whiskey-related question is related to markup: in particular, what sort of markup should you expect, and how does that vary depending on where you decide to imbibe? My starting point for this was to take a linear transformation of the price data in the chart above: LCBO bottle price divided by the number of ounces per bottle, multiplied by three. I figured that a 3x markup would be pretty close to what a bar might charge in Toronto. I then layered in the results of some fieldwork: actual ounce prices at some local establishments.

My 3x transformation wasn’t too far off the mark and fits the data fairly well. Calvin Bar consistently prices their whiskeys a little over 3x above LCBO, but they also offer a 2-for-1 deal every evening of the week so we shouldn’t complain too much. It is also interesting to see that if you are willing to shell out for some expensive scotch, you can get some great deals at the Caledonian and at Feathers.

You can get the R code to produce the charts above here and the underlying data here. I don’t have a clean, reproducible workflow for the web scraping just yet.