Best/Worst Distro areas.

While travelling to Hawaii I was actually impressed. I stayed on Kauai, which is the most remote and western of all the big islands, and they had 2 craft breweries! Plus, I was routinely getting Cali beers and Deschutes. Didn't expect that. This was in addition to Kona and Maui. Not too shabby.

I'd have to add Vermont to the conversation. The only state in the union with access to Hill Farmstead, Alchemist, and Lawson's. What more do you need? Not much, but they seem to get great beers from elsewhere too.

 

I thought Utah was going to be a nightmare but then we discoverd the bar Beer Hive and had such a great time there. The state run liquor stores are really strange but had a better selection than I thought they'd have. I'll tell you what though, never got sick of fresh full suspension on tap literally everywhere.

 

This is true.One guy doing it by himself. I sent him an email last year with some update info . It took him a of couple of months to respond, but he did add the updates. All his data is based on what we send him. So there you go.

 

My area is decent given the population and location. We have a great produce market in town that also stocks tons of craft beer. There really aren't any "great beer bars" around here. My favorite bar has nine taps or so with a few decent beers surrounded by Guinness, Blue Moon, and the like. They usually always have Bell's Two Hearted Ale on tap. Also notable, they managed to snag a sixth barrel of Hopslam last season, the only keg in the entire county.

I haven't traveled enough, need to stake out some great beer areas for future trips.

 

I can't think of any other place that has Philadelphia's level of distro.

 

If you're in southern Vermont, I'd say that is a partially true statement.

 

I live in a small town in VA and its terrible, the local bottle shop is always high on prices (Usually 3-7$ high). My highlight is driving an hour to be able to find beer at a Total Wine and More

 

Pricing would be my only complaint about NYC distro, Deschutes and New Belgium are the only "nearly national" brands we don't get, and while I've had good beers from both, I don't feel I'm missing out on much by not having them.

We also get treated very well by major out of region breweries like Founders, Firestone and Stone and regularly get decent allotments of their special releases. Founders, especially, has marketed very aggressively to be seen as NYCs craft beer, and they are doing a very good job of it. You can go to non craft places and find Founders on tap regularly.

In Brooklyn specifically, Evil Twin (and I assume by association, Westbrook) has a nice presence that almost makes them feel like local brews as well (Jeppe has an apt here in addition to the obvious Torst connection).

Regional brews like Ommegang and Allagash are also very commonly found.

 

In terms of selection in places I have been

Great:

• San Diego,
• Portland OR
• Washington DC area (which includes VA and MD suburbs for some mixed variety, with a new brewery showing up almost every 2 weeks)
• Philadelphia (lots of variety and choices to get around the case law in PA),
• Chicago

Pretty good:

• Austin TX, a good developing scene with some decent brews, some stores also have good variety. Although heard much of the rest of the state is pretty bad.
• Maine, sleeper local breweries in this state with some other options
• Vermont, pretty much saved by big hyped and great local breweries
• Denver, much like Vermont where there is just so much good local stuff you could care less what is available from outside.

Poor:

• New Hampshire, weak selection
• rural PA, limited choices plus antiquated case and 196oz rules don't help either
• Delaware. Even though no sales tax, it doesn't offer much different than what surrounding states offer and much less of it in my opinion. Not one I think most people think about.

 

Evidently, somebody is attempting to answer this important question. I don't like the methodology of using just the RateBeer top 20 breweries. But it gives an idea.

 

www.beermenus.com is a good source for finding those goto stores and bars with all of the in demand current brews in the NY/NJ market.

A few locations don't quite know how to copy and paste their excel worksheets into it and I've had a couple of wasted trips, but overall it's a great web resource.

 

Compared with the surrounding states (except Florida...but mainly only from Tampa down) Alabama is kicking ass. To have only recently even legalized beers over 5.9%ABV a few years ago they've really taken to craft beer really quickly. When I lived there in the 90's it was probably in the top 5-6 worst beer states in the country. Now it's definitely in the upper half.

 

I always feel like NYC is simultaneously the best and the worst.

The best analogy I can think of is music - almost any band you'd want to listen to is going to play NYC, however getting tickets for a show is a crapshoot and even if you get in the door, the venue is likely going to be packed wall-to-wall. Same with beer - we get a ton of great releases here, but tracking them down can be horrible.

Westchester County seems to have most of the benefits of NYC, with even more significant distribution, with fewer of the drawbacks.

 

Pretty happy where I live in Eastern PA. 2 hours from Philly, a number of decent bottleshops in the area, and then you have the Weyerbacher/Victory/Troegs triangle. 196ozs can be a bit of a pain, but every shop I've been into has no probably with me taking the first haul out to the car and then coming right back in.

It seems WV is the worse. And I think I'm right in saying they don't distro any of their beers outside the state (Mountaineers, correct me if I'm wrong) Still one of the few states where I haven't been able to sample their ales. Looks like road trip to the western part of WV is in order.

Still, even the worse off places still have some excellent brews to sup on. Cheers!

 

All I could find in West Virginia was ABI, MC, and SA. So, I took it as an opportunity to take a sip Redd's Apple and Strawberry before pouring them down the drain and wishing I had made it to Virginia before stopping for the night.

 

Rhode Island could be better. When some brewers have experienced growing pains ( DFH, NEBCO, Avery just to name a few) we tend to get dropped.

 

in Michigan we do get a few good ones
stone
dogfish head
lagunitas
just wish we could het more of the big dogs like
3 floyds
firestone walker
cigar city
russian river
the only reason michigan is a great beer state is all the kickass beers we make here

 

We're getting better. Picked up a number of breweries new to the state the last couple of years, and more to come this year and next with the Stone-Maui Brewing distro collab. In fact, Green Flash is finally getting out here this weekend. Hoppin' Frog and New Belgium (finally) will be out here in the coming months.

 

I always think it's best to exclude NYC from any discussion such as this. It's NYC, it's in its own class in all aspects, good or bad. It just doesn't work to compare it to any other U.S. city.

 

Texas isn't the absolute best, but it ain't bad.

Between what's coming out of DFW, Austin, Houston, Real Ale, Cedar Creek, 5 Stones, etc...Texas produces it's own very good to great beers.

We also get distro from the likes of Founder's, Goose Island, Firestone Walker, Deschuttes, Prairie, Ballast Point, Avery, Boulevard, Clown Shoes, Dogfish, Lagunitas, among others. What I'm most excited for (and maybe someone can confirm this?) is this: I heard, from a local bar owner, that Bell's is going to be in Texas some time next year. I think I'd live off of Bell's for a year if that were to happen.

Would love to see Cigar City and Westbrook out here, but that's not likely to ever happen.