A ‘Not So Smart’ Guide To Best US Beer Cities

Financial and real estate firms such as SmartAsset have been using beer as a way to draw younger visitors to their sites for years.

Beer is viewed as vital, youthful and trendy… retirement and refinancing rates, not so much.

And while the methodology used in these kinds of rankings can get sketchy…they still can be fun… even when their overall results sometimes strain credibility.

SmartAsset began ranking “best beer cities” in 2015 and they’ve just released the 2020 rankings based on 384 cities nationwide.

Using data derived from RateBeer, they start by calculating the total number of breweries and brewpubs in a city per 100,000 residents.

But things get a little sketchier when they introduce the average number of beers per brewery (again this data is input from RateBeer users not from the actual breweries).

And when the methodology takes into the average price for a pint of a domestic draft beer in any given city, things get ridiculously skewed especially from a craft beer perspective.

The good news they’re no longer taking into account the average Yelp score of breweries as they did in the 2017 rankings

Key Findings

• The priciest pint is in California. The most expensive average pint in the country is in San Leandro, California, a suburban town in the San Francisco Bay Area. The average pint in this town is a whopping $10, compared to the average price of $4.59 across all 384 cities in the study.
• Mid-sized cities offer more beer bang for the buck. If you’re a beer drinker, don’t look to the biggest cities in the country. Instead, consider cities in the next tier down in terms of size. Eight of the top 10 cities in our study – all except Portland, Oregon and Denver, Colorado – have a population of 400,000 or fewer residents.
• 3x’s more breweries in top 10 cities. The average number of breweries per 100,000 residents is 3.88 across the whole study, while it is more than triple this figure across the top 10, at 12.47.

Top 10 cities for beer drinkers

1. Cincinnati, OH
2. Asheville, NC
3. Louis, MO
4. Portland, OR
5. Pittsburgh, PA
6. Denver, CO
7. Bend, OR
8. Madison, WI
9. Missoula, MT
10. Cleveland, OH

And here is SmartAsset’s complete 2020 ranking…