How does beer relate to Scrapping Data?

Sometimes I find myself involved in projects as a result of having just one too many rounds of beer after a meetup. Such is the case with the beer predictor. In an overt attempt to ingratiate ourselves with the local craft brewers we thought it would be a good idea to write some analytics on craft beers to get noticed by those brewers so that they would in turn supply us with free beer. At least we had a reasonable goal in mind. I will update that project as we go along.  The first part of the project was to scrap the data from the Beer Advocate. I had not started doing this because it was St Paddy's day, and I felt the proper way to study beer on that day is consumption. Others wrote code, and finished that portion of the project. I did come across this blog post on scrapping data in R with XML versus in Python with Beautiful Soup which I thought was interesting.

http://thelogcabin.wordpress.com/2010/08/31/using-xml-package-vs-beautifulsoup/