I have a lot of pride in my Wisconsin roots – especially when it comes to beer. Although, the quality of WI beer (and beer drinkers) is hard to rival, since moving to Colorado, I’ve felt conflicted whenever I hear Coloradans bragging about the number of breweries in this state. Then, a couple of weeks ago I was discussing this point with some coworkers – one from CA and one from WA – who both thought their states had “a lot” of breweries too. When it comes to beer, this isn’t my first rodeo (or my first map) so I feel pretty qualified to get to the bottom of this issue…
Number of Breweries by State From brewersassocation.org as of 10/8/12 |
|
California | 512 |
Colorado | 259 |
Washington | 214 |
Texas | 171 |
Oregon | 168 |
New York | 164 |
Pennsylvania | 160 |
Michigan | 150 |
Illinois | 138 |
Wisconsin | 119 |
North Carolina | 105 |
Florida | 104 |
Ohio | 93 |
Virginia | 89 |
Massachusetts | 83 |
Minnesota | 81 |
Missouri | 73 |
Arizona | 68 |
Indiana | 66 |
Georgia | 59 |
New Jersey | 54 |
Tennessee | 54 |
Iowa | 49 |
Maryland | 47 |
Montana | 47 |
Maine | 45 |
Idaho | 38 |
Connecticut | 37 |
New Mexico | 35 |
Nevada | 33 |
Nebraska | 31 |
New Hampshire | 30 |
Vermont | 30 |
Alaska | 29 |
South Carolina | 29 |
Utah | 27 |
Louisiana | 25 |
Alabama | 23 |
Kansas | 21 |
Wyoming | 20 |
Delaware | 19 |
Kentucky | 18 |
Hawaii | 16 |
Oklahoma | 16 |
South Dakota | 15 |
Arkansas | 13 |
District of Columbia | 13 |
Rhode Island | 10 |
West Virginia | 10 |
North Dakota | 8 |
Mississippi | 7 |
Total US Breweries: | 3,725 |
A table of all of this data is displayed to the right. →
I acknowledge this map has limitations. For example:
- Texas is ginormous – so 171 breweries really isn’t that impressive. Actually, looking at breweries per capita by state may be more indicative of quality beer culture. The Brewers Association does just that and found Vermont to be number one. Wisconsin was an unfortunate number nine in 2011.
- This data is from the Brewers Association’s Find US Brewery page and was retrieved on 10/8/12. While I believe this list to be pretty comprehensive,
- Breweries throughout the US are constantly changing from year to year
- The list includes both “breweries in planning” and chains, such as BJ’s (counting multiple BJ’s locations in one state seems like cheating)
- The Beer Mapping Project takes breweries in each state a step further and plots actual location. It’s very interesting to look at density of breweries in certain regions of the country. For example, while the above map shows that Illinois has 138 breweries, almost all of these are located in the Chicago area.
Regardless of Wisconsin’s rank, either by total breweries or breweries per capita, there is one thing that Wisconsin has that no other state does:
Surprising that most of the breweries in Illinois are near Chicago because there are very few microbrewery/local brewpub type restaurants in the city.
Pingback: Number of Brewery by State | Microbrew Adventure