Beer Availability by Region

Lived in NY for most of my life and I thought the selection was pretty fantastic for the most part. In the past year Founders has moved into the region and I was able to find Drie Fonteinen in some select locations. Overall, a pretty good place to be for craft beer. Best part was the growler fills at gas stations.

I lived in Delaware for about 9 months and was actually pleasantly surprised with the selection of beer. Granted, I tried to seek out local beers and beer I wouldn't have access to when I left the area. I lived literally minutes from DFH so I regularly visited their brewpub and also visited Evo before they moved to Md. Lots of good beer, but the best part was no sales tax, worst part was that you had to go to liquor stores to buy beer.

My new state is Ohio, specifically Columbus, which I mention because the craft movement seems to really be gaining momentum in the city. There are beer bars and new breweries popping up everywhere. In the limited time I've been here I'd say it has the best selection beer I've had access to and is very craft friendly even with a Budweiser plant on the north side. Accessibility is great too, beer in grocery stores or mini marts, and growler fills at bars, restaurants, and grocery stores.

 

Lots of great beer at some of the grocery store-branded stand-alone/attached liquor stores like Shop-Rite, Wegmans and (in the past, anyway) A&P. Many such stores are not owned by the chain, for the reason noted below*. Very few grocery stores even have liquor licenses that allow them to sell beer in their regular aisles and at their regular registers, but some are still around.

The liquor store chains are co-operatives and the stores are individually owned (*no more than two off-premise licenses per entity in NJ) and, as a result, the selection can vary greatly from store to store. I've seen some poor selections in some Canals, Joe Canal's, Buy-Rites and Spirits Unlimited stores.

 

that we got another Yankee here, oh well.. but sounds about right....NC is nice state and Athens, ga is close by

 

NC has somewhat of a decent availablity. Im from Raleigh, and usually shop for beer at Total Wine, Bottle Revolution, Peace St. market, and Whole Foods. We are kinda limited on west coast brews. But we do have a vast variety of local "instate" brews that are pretty good.

 

I think you need to come up with a reasonable definition of "Region" Take California for instance, you could find yourself in parts of that state where it would be farther to drive to find a good selection than anyone living anywhere in Vermont. Heck, take the "Top beers by regions" in this website, supposedly a vehicle to expose lesser known breweries and beers. What do you find? The entire west coast including Alaska and Hawaii are in one "region". It evidently is a very tough question to answer.

 

I generally agree with your assessment of Washington, we're awash in great beer up here and it just keeps getting better. However, depending on the store people are reasonably knowledgeable—not necessarily by beer-geek standards, but by normal-people standards.

 

In CO we're knee-deep in beer goodness. Tons of amazing nano breweries around and great bottle shops. We don't really get any East coast stuff or much mid west unfortunately. The Colorado-only distributions more then make up for this. People are fairly knowledgeable at any beer shop and I almost always strike up a conversation with a fellow beer geek while perusing.

 

Florida is improving, daily. It really depends on where you live at this point. Tampa metro, Jax metro, Orlando, the Treasure Coast, and Palm Beach/Broward/Miami Dade are really coming along. Most other places in between aren't so much. As a native, I'm just happy to get what we are at this point.

 

They do exist. Up by me we've got one in our A&P, but I'm at the NYS border. I didn't even know it was so rare at first because I moved here from NY and it seemed so natural to buy beer that way.

The funny thing is, now I'm getting used to the NJ way where we can buy beer in Liquor stores (you still can't do that in NY- only liquor and wine). I was recently up in Pearl River, NY, and they have a separate Shop Rite liquor store just like in NJ, so I stopped in to see what they carry and it took me a minute or two before I realized my mistake.

 

NC is wide open you can get great beer at the grocery store. DFH, Two Hearted Ale, Hop Devil, Southern Tier, most of the better German brews too. I can get SNPA at most gas stations too. Then there's the bottle shops, and they have everything distributed into the state.

 

Yeah NC has some good selection, and more and more breweries are distributing to our market, but there are some that will never make it here. And that is why all vacations are centered around visiting new breweries.

 

humm we may have more places that brew but how well? imho is not very well. In Jax. Tampa rocks, Orlando is decent, Pensacola is coming along (I had 1 beer from there). No idea about Miami too damn far to drive. Just my 2 cents comparing what we have versus better places.

 

Seems to me that the further south you go, the more limited the good beer selection seems to be. It may take some time for better beer to "catch on" in areas where BMC is revered [translation: NASCAR territory] and where people don't know or care that there is other beer than BMC. That's as PC as I can say it. Sorry.

 

in the large cities some of us do, we are not all hicks. some of us finished high school. and we got lots of Yankees down here now, they hated the cold weather.

still I do enjoy you might be a redneck jokes....

 

I was referring to distributed availability of beer in general, not just local breweries. This state is coming along in that regard, but leaps and bounds behind most other states on all fronts, frankly. We'll get there eventually.

 

I do hope so. Some of these guys need to visit the brew school IMHO.

 

I live in southeastern PA and my home state's prices suck for the most part (getting better) but the selection is the best I've seen anywhere (as far as representing good beers from across the country). I travel a lot in CA, CO, OR, MI and yes those states have better breweries than PA but not close to the selection.