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The craft beer business is booming. In the U.S., there are 5300 small breweries, and according to some industry leaders, this is the “greatest time in history to be a beer drinker in America.” But where is the best place to find a microbrew?
On the data visualization site The Pudding, Russell Goldenberg breaks down the geography of U.S. craft beer production and consumption to show you just why Santa Rosa, California might be the best place for beer in America. His visualizations—spotted by FlowingData—are based on data from RateBeer and designed to weigh both the quantity of breweries within the area and user ratings of those beers.
Using his interactive infographic, you can adjust the ratings—the number of breweries, the size of your radius, and the weighting of quantity versus quality—to see which cities fare best. (If you’re just looking at quantity, Denver comes out on top.)
To understand how booming the business of craft beer is, check out this infographic, which graphs how many new breweries have opened in each state per capita between 1997 and 2016. While a fair amount of new breweries opened in cities in ’97, there were none with more than one per 100,000 people. That’s substantially less than have been startiing up more recently in places with reputations as craft meccas, like Colorado, Oregon, and California (which, thanks to its giant population, actually has a really low new-brewery-per-capita ratio).
See all the beerfographics on The Pudding.
[h/t FlowingData]
April 24, 2017 – 1:00am