Santa Rosa dubbed 'microbrew capital of the U.S.'

David Buchmueller (left) from Santa Rosa meets David Mendivil (right) visiting from Arizona as he tries a sampler tray at the Russian River Brewing Company brewpub in Santa Rosa, Calif., on Monday, October 26, 2015. less David Buchmueller (left) from Santa Rosa meets David Mendivil (right) visiting from Arizona as he tries a sampler tray at the Russian River Brewing Company brewpub in Santa Rosa, Calif., on Monday, October 26, ... more Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Santa Rosa dubbed 'microbrew capital of the U.S.' 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

While many other U.S. metropolitan regions might be known as more obvious beer meccas than the greater San Francisco Bay Area, there's one section of the craft beer landscape where one of our cities apparently thrives: microbreweries.

A researcher named Russell Goldenberg with a visual data website called The Pudding scoured some data from RateBeer.com, a beer rating site, as well as census and map information, and deduced the city with with the best microbrewing culture in the United States: Santa Rosa, California. Santa Rosa beat out such high profile beer hubs as San Diego, Denver, Portland, and Chicago, primarily due to the quality of Santa Rosa area breweries Russian River Brewing, Bear Republic Brewing Co., Shady Oak Barrel House, Moonlight Brewing Company and Cooperage Brewing Company, as scored by RateBeer.com users.

Goldenberg notes that the findings might seem subjective because an area's ranking is weighted 80 percent on "quality" and a 20 percent on "quantity" (which lands Santa Rosa at the top of the list), but a user who values diverse brewery options can change that by adding more weight to the "quantity" field (which drops Santa Rosa down the list).

Related: Barebottle releases its first bottle, Black Hammer plans CBD beer, and more in this week's Bay Area beer scene

There is one thing to note for staunch craft beer advocates: the breweries highlighted in Goldenberg's data aren't necessarily "microbreweries," at least according to the definition put forth by the Brewers Association. The BA, on their site, defines a microbrewery as one that that produces "less than 15,000 barrels of beer per year with 75 percent or more of its beer sold off-site." Absent from the BA's list of U.S. microbreweries is Healdsburg's Bear Republic, cited in Goldenberg's study. (Russian River, also noted in Goldenberg's study, may also now be too large to be considered "micro.")

Nevertheless, the premise of the project is fun, with the user able to adjust the weight of the data to see where their ideal beer city is. See the full results of the study here.

Alyssa Pereira is a SFGATE staff writer. Email her at apereira@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @alyspereira.

