What’s the Most Popular McHenry County Beer?
Looking at the number of check-ins for beer from McHenry County breweries.
What do Crystal Lake Brewing’s Beach Blonde and Scorched Earth Brewing Company’s Rugged Coalminer have in common? They are two of the most popular beers produced in McHenry County breweries.
Here’s the full list of top 10 popular beers:
I chose total check-ins as the metric here, but it’s interesting to note that the top 10 list would have been the same had I used ratings or unique check-ins. Combined, the top 10 popular beers account for 19.18% of check-ins on Untappd for McHenry County breweries—meaning that nearly 1 in 5 check-ins on Untappd at McHenry County breweries are for one of those ten beers. Beach Blonde is so popular that more than 1 in 20 check-ins of McHenry County beer is for Beach Blonde.
You’ll also notice that two breweries split the top 10 evenly. Overall, Scorched Earth Brewing accounts for 43.57% of the check-ins for McHenry County beer on Untappd while Crystal Lake Brewing accounts for 35.11%.
I also wanted to look at the most popular type of beer across all the McHenry County breweries:
It’s no surprise that IPA is, by far, the most popular type of beer and accounts for 24.2% of beers brewed by McHenry County breweries—that’s nearly 1 out of every 4 beers. Coming in second is stout at 13.7%—more than 1 out of every 8 beers. (Side note: I’ll be doing a deep dive into IPAs for National IPA Day on August 5.)
I also wanted to look at the most popular type of beer brewed at each McHenry County brewery:
For only two breweries—Sew Hop'd Brewery and Spirit Water—the most popular type wasn’t IPA. Stout was the second most popular type of beer at six out of nine breweries.
Data notes: I pulled the data on 3/29/2022, so the exact number of check-ins is likely different than what you find on Untappd today. In the dataset I pulled, there were a total of 173,402 check-ins. This does not include beer with fewer than 10 ratings since Untappd doesn’t calculate a rating for those beers.