Is Indy a Top Beer City?
by Gary Dean
You bet it is! Don’t just take my word for it, others think so, as well. Let’s take a look at how four different organizations rated Indianapolis as a beer city during the past year. In March, the USA Today Reader’s Choice Poll rated Indianapolis the 5th best beer city in the country. The methodology that they utilized to make this determination included forming a panel of experts to partner with their 10Best editors to pick the initial nominees, and then the top 10 winners were determined by popular vote among the readers of the newspaper. The complete rating of the top ten winners can be viewed here.
In May, the Real Estate Witch website ranked the Fifty Best Beer Cities in America. They analyzed publicly available data to rank 50 of America’s most populous metropolitan areas from best to worst. Their weighted rankings evaluated the number of breweries within each metro area, the density of breweries per 100 square miles, the number of beers brewed per brewery and the number of beer styles per brewery. In this case Indy ranked 2nd, behind only San Francisco! Check out the results here.
Move.org looked at the 100 largest cities in the U.S. and ranked them for beer lovers based on how many breweries they have per 100,000 residents. In this instance, Indianapolis had 3.76 breweries per 100,000 residents, ranking it 34th out of 100.
smartasset published their Best Cities for Beer Drinkers – 2021 Edition in December. To find the best cities for beer drinkers, they considered all the cities included in the 2020 Census with a population of 60,000, at least one brewery and available Numbeo data. This resulted in a total of 366 cities, which they compared across the following metrics:
- Total number of breweries. Data comes from ratebeer.com and was pulled in November 2021.
- Number of breweries per 100,000 residents. Data on microbreweries and brewpubs comes from ratebeer.com and was pulled in November 2021. Population data comes from the 2020 Census.
- Average number of beers per brewery. Data comes from ratebeer.com and was pulled in November 2021.
- Number of bars per 100,000 residents. Data on bars comes from the 2019 County Business Patterns Survey while population data comes from the 2020 Census. This metric is at the county level.
- Average price for a pint of domestic draught beer. Data comes from Numbeo.com and was pulled in January 2021.
In this instance, Indianapolis ranked 43rd out of the 366 cities. (Fort Wayne ranked 23rd and Bloomington 50th.)
As you’ve probably noticed by now, not one of these ranking entities included the popularity or quality of the beers in their rankings. The closest would be the USA Today rankings that at least included a panel of experts and voting by the beer loving public. It would seem to me that cities with a large number of breweries per 100,000 residents, whose beers only rated average or below, by beer lovers, should receive a much lower rating than a city with fewer breweries that are rated above average to outstanding. Just because a city has a large number of breweries doesn’t make it a great beer city. Why doesn’t someone do rankings by metro area that includes the average ratings, of the beers brewed in each area, by such apps as Untappd or RateBeer. Until that occurs, we can look at various rewards received by breweries in a city. Looking at recent awards received by Indy breweries, I think that I can safely say that Indianapolis belongs near the top of the rankings!
In 2020 Sun King won four medals at the Great American Beer Festival (GABF), more than any other individual brewery. They also rank in the top five for the most combined awards worldwide from GABF and the World Beer Cup (WBC), since their opening in 2009. Metazoa Brewing won two medals in 2020 and followed up last year with three medals as well as receiving Brewery of the Year and Brewer of the Year awards. Moontown Brewing in Whitestown also won five medals over the past two years. 18th Street Brewing won Best Brewpub in the Country from USA Today in 2020, for their brewpub in Hammond. They have since added a taproom in Indianapolis.