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Seattle Beer Week kicked off last night and runs for the next ten days. Dozens of events across the city and in the surrounding area will celebrate our outstanding beer culture. Granted, Seattle Beer Week is not about Seattle-brewed beer, but it could be, and maybe it should be. That’s my opinion, anyway. It’s now a matter of fact, Seattle is the top city in the USA when it comes to breweries.

A report recently published by Datafiniti reveals that Seattle has more breweries than any other city in the country. The Seattle MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) is now home to 174 breweries. This was determined by analyzing data provided by the Brewers Association.

Of all the reports I’ve read, this one seems the most thorough and straightforward. Too often these types of things are just lists based on opinion, arriving at conclusions the author hoped to find. Datafiniti explains their methodology and notes some of the challenges of interpreting this kind of data. They draw some obvious conclusions based on the data, not opinion. You can read the report here.

Instead of staying within city limits, Datafiniti looked at Metropolitan Statistical Areas. For instance, instead of looking at San Francisco proper, they included the surrounding cities in the Bay Area. For Seattle, they included what we we would call the Seattle-Tacoma area. Among other top cities for breweries, Chicago ranked second, followed by Denver and Portland.

In addition to analyzing which cities have the most breweries, Datafiniti also examined things like Most Breweries per Capita (by state), where Washington ranked sixth. We have 4.6 breweries for every 100k people. Impressive.

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