#Recap#

Last week, I presented visualizations of beer-dense neighborhoods in twenty American cities. I encourage those who didn’t see my original post to check it out for an explanation of my methodology (which I’ve since realized may be similar to multivariate kernel density estimation?).

In my original approach, I considered all the locations RateBeer could tell me about, including beer stores and homebrew shops that were particularly good. This week, I’m paring back the set of locations I look at: if we only look at bars, brewpubs and restaurants, are our results the same? The question we’re looking into this week is subtly different from that of last week. My original graphs may have been better tailored to determining where to live to be surrounded by good beer, whereas the graphs I’ll present here may be more applicable to those just looking to go out and grab a pint or two or three. In addition to paring back the types of locations looked at, I also expanded my search area in each city, to make sure I wasn’t missing any high-density areas of sprawling cities like L.A.

Results

First, let’s compare how the rankings we presented last week have changed:

Previous Criteria

Considering all beer-related locations, we produced the following list of locations in our previous post:

1. Philadelphia, PA: Thomas Jefferson University: 688
2. Asheville, NC: Patton at Broadway: 610.8
3. NY,NY: Bowery: 610.6
4. Fort Collins, CO: 597
5. Denver, CO: LODO: 488
6. Brooklyn, NY: Williamsburg: 439
7. Washington, DC: Dupont Circle: 428
8. Washington, DC: Logan Circle: 419
9. NY,NY: Flatiron District: 401
10. Portland, ME: Downtown: 393
11. Atlanta, GA: Decatur: 380
12. Portland, OR: West Side: 379
13. Washington, DC: Adams Morgan: 378

New Criteria

Only considering bars, brewpubs and restaurants, we get the following list of top neighborhoods:

1. Philadelphia, PA: Thomas Jefferson University: 667
2. Fort Collins, CO: 449
3. NY,NY: Bowery: 409
4. Denver, Colorado: LODO: 407
5. Asheville, NC: Patton at Broadway 406
6. NY,NY: Flatiron District: 393
7. Atlanta, GA: Decatur: 388
8. Brooklyn, NY: Williamsburg: 374
9. Philadelphia, PA: Finn’s Landing: 353
10. Portland, OR: West Side: 332
11. Washington, DC: Dupont Circle: 332
12. Portland, ME: Downtown: 327
13. San Diego, CA: Northblock Lofts: 301

Discussion

Most neighborhoods have dropped quite a bit. Two of DC’s three salient neighborhoods have dropped of our radar, and Atlanta has climbed a few spots. There were two main surprises for me, though. First, Philadelphia has barely dropped at all. It’s so far out ahead of everyone else, it’s shocking. Second, I expected Fort Collins to drop as well, since I’m no longer counting the many breweries that beef up Fort Collins’ downtown. But, as a colleague reminded me, many of Fort Collins’ breweries double as killer brewpubs. And thus, Fort Collins is #2 in this analysis.

So yes, this changed between-city rankings. But within particular cities, did this effect interesting changes? I live in Boston. Let’s look at Boston! Here’s Boston’s new map, using within-city color scaling. Click on the map for the interactive version (same with all the images in this post)

If you compare this to last week, you’ll see that Davis Square (the neighborhood to the north) is no longer the beery center of Boston, which is instead now found in Cambridge. This matches the expectations we previously had: Cambridge has much better beer bars, Medford has much better beer shops.

I also thought it’d be interesting to look at how cities compared as a whole: if you sum up the scores of the top 1000 locations for each city, you can assign it a city-wide score.

1. NY, NY: 224,109

   

2. Philadelphia, PA: 182,093

   

3. Portland, OR: 124,470

   

4. Chicago, IL: 119,740

   

5. Washington, DC: 111,581

   

6. Atlanta, GA: 104,684

   

7. Seattle, WA: 103,337

   

8. San Diego, CA: 101,266

   

9. San Francisco, CA: 90,388

   

10. Los Angeles, CA: 86,866

    

11. Denver, CO: 85,938

    

12. Boston, MA: 82,527

    

13. Baltimore, MD: 63,851

    

This gives a metric for the amount of beer-friendly space in a city, although obviously this is going to have a mild correlation with the size of the city, as seen below.

That being said, Portland,OR has the lowest population of the top 13, but has the third highest city score, and overall this may still be a useful way to think about what cities are most likely to provide you a reliable source of craft beer goodness. I think it helps get at what we see in the stacked bar chart: yes, Philadelphia has that downtown beer Mecca. But over half of New York City’s top-1000 spots are blue or better; it still has a lot of good beer but its spread out a little more (although not so much as in, e.g., Los Angeles).

Finally, here is a list of maps for those cities we examined that have not yet been linked to in this article (some of which are locations requested by readers).

1. Albuquerque, NM
2. Asheville, NC
3. Austin, TX
4. Bend, OR
5. Boise, ID
6. Buffalo, NY
7. Burlington, VT
8. Charlotte, NC
9. Dallas, TX
10. Fort Collins, CO
11. Kalamazoo, MI
12. Louisville, KY
13. Portland, ME
14. Providence, RI
15. Santa Fe, NM