Beer City, USA

I appreciate Serious Eats putting together a city beer brawl, so various cities’ partisans can fight it out publicly. But if you are going to do it, can we be serious about it? Other than the obvious answer being Portland, if you want to vote for Denver, Asheville, San Diego, or Burlington, that’s fine, you can make a case. But New York? Are you serious? The justification seems to be literally “we have a few good breweries here but we get lots of beer from other, better, cities and then you can take the subway home.” And while I respect that last point, good public transportation does not a good beer city make. At best, New York is an average beer city, but clearly well below Seattle and Chicago and probably below Cleveland and Minneapolis-St. Paul, at the very least. And as for Tampa being on the list, I have no idea. Cigar City is pretty good and I confess I haven’t had any of the other breweries. So who knows, maybe it is! But if I was going to go with a dark horse, Grand Rapids is a much more plausible choice.

…Meanwhile, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune worried that Minnesota might have too much craft beer. In a related story, Minnesotans are a bunch of Lutherans who have to create pointless things to worry about.