Evaluating Beer Cities
Picture generated by Midjourney. Prompt: “City made of beer glasses, impressionist style”
Here’s an evergreen article. Find a few statistics related to beer available at a city level. Crunch the numbers, and ta da!, you have a list of the country’s best beer cities. Stan linked to a current example in his weekly news round-up, which got me thinking.
The most obvious problem with these things is the available data—even a casual beer fan can see that the price of beer or random Google search terms would seem very weak metrics. (Others, like breweries per capita, are better but have different faults.) If your process is based on stats, you use what’s available, even if they don’t really apply to the question at hand. Call that an input issue. But there’s also a more subtle problem: if we had available stats for anything we wanted, which ones would we use? In other words, how do you define a good beer city? Call that an output issue. The biggest problem in these evergreen “best beer city” stories—and they date back at least thirty years—is that no one defines the output.
Let’s spend this lovely Friday (it’s supposed to be in the mid-70s and sunny here today) on a thought experiment. How do we build a better output?
Food Cities
Let’s leave beer aside for the moment and step onto firmer ground. While sites like Wallet Hub and Real Estate Witch (?) generate these same kinds of dumb lists about food cities to bring people to their websites, I don’t think anyone takes them very seriously. In the context of good food, “cheapest meals” seems even more absurd than cheapest beer.
Instead, when we think of good food cities, we think of places with the best food. You could look at the high end and even measure it, if crudely—for example, by counting Michelin-starred restaurants. Or maybe you go lowbrow and consider cities that have a lot of excellent street food. Perhaps you want to consider the quality of the average or median restaurant—is it an Applebees or a corner Thai place?
You probably want to look at variety as well. Is a city’s offerings characterized by a few good restaurants amid a sea of chain outlets and fast food, or are the world’s cuisines represented? How experimental are the restaurants? Are you likely to find a restaurant making truly original meals? (New York and Miami score very high on this one.)
It’s also hard to ignore local cuisine. Austin is always going to be in the mix because you can’t overlook barbecue. New Orleans is in a class by itself. Some regions are known for certain classic dishes or regional cuisines, while others might have great offerings, but nothing that has developed locally. My home town, often lauded—correctly—for great food, scores poorly on this test.
Finally, access to local ingredients are important (this often connects to strong local cuisine). You can order lobster in Las Vegas, but honestly, why would you? Lobster on the Cape—now we’re talking. Fresh, local ingredients make tasty eats.
Beer Cities
If all that makes pretty obvious sense for food—and I don’t think it’s controversial—why do we ignore so many of the same dimensions when considering beer? It probably has to do with our immature sense of beer culture here in the US. It wasn’t that long ago that the mere presence of breweries was a significant measure of culture; it meant locals had some choice beyond national domestic brands. But no one counts restaurants when they’re considering food culture, they count good restaurants. Now that every American city has dozens of breweries, we need to adopt a more subtle way of thinking about this.
Breweries don’t get Michelin stars, but we can still look at those truly exceptional examples. Does a city have one? More? Take a city’s ten best breweries—how do they stack up? Flip that: how many bad breweries does a city have? If customers are willing to tolerate bad beer, what’s it say about a city? Or, as in dining, what’s the average or median brewery in a like?
Following the food example, we might consider:
Variety. How many specialist breweries can a city support. Does the city have a lager brewery, one doing wild ales, a hazy house, a cask ale brewery? Do the breweries have noticeable and distinctive character?
Local styles. The US is an IPA country, so you’re going to find those everywhere. But does the local scene have its own distinctive character? For example, at least as recently as 18 months ago, New England was way more hazy-happy than anyplace else. South Florida was (I hope still is) thick with tart fruit beers. Southern California has its own, distinctive and ubiquitous forms of IPA; the Pacific Northwest has fresh-hop beers. (In Europe this is a far bigger factor, and illustrates how nascent the US’s beer development is.)
Local ingredients. Commercial hop-growing is concentrated in one region of the US, but barley is grown more broadly and small malthouses are spread around the country. Ingredients beyond the big three are also common, especially fruit. Have breweries incorporated these into their beers?
I think about these factors a lot when I travel, and it has helped certain cities come into focus in my mind. Minneapolis is especially lager-centric, basically doesn’t do brewpubs at all, and—cuing Garrison Keillor—all the breweries seemed above-average. Atlanta has an incredibly impressive top tier of breweries, though it would be hard to surpass Portland, ME (especially if you accept Maine Beer Co as a Portland brewery). I’ve got my eye on lager-centered Austin, which has blossomed lately. San Diego, by contrast, seemed to be suffering through a hazy-inspired identity crisis the last time I was there in 2021. Surely an amazing city, but struggling just at the moment? New Jersey’s cities, to consider a region lacking in distinction, score pretty badly on most of these metrics.
These dimensions are not easy to quantify, and it takes serious shoe leather to do field research. Yet if you’re not considering them, however, you’re not seriously trying to address what an actual “good beer city” looks like. The next time you see a clickbaity article promising a quantified list of the best breweries, resist the click.