But the interesting thing is that in many of these cases, the actual brewery has moved on, but its customers haven't. You'd think that these areas simply surround where each beer is brewed. In many of these cases, the brewery has moved on, but its customers haven't So the researchers looked at 14 of some of the highest-selling beers after the big four, and mapped the areas where tweets about them are particularly likely to come from. 3) Beers like Sam Adams and Corona have devoted regional followingsīut looking solely at raw numbers of tweets tends to favor the massive beers and drown out all the smaller beers with passionate regional followings. It turns out that they share dominance in the same region of the Midwest, with Busch Light inexplicably popular in Iowa in particular. The only other beer that comes even close is Coors Light, the taste of the Rockies, which is popular out west.Įach of the companies that own Bud Light and Coors Light also own a secondary light beer: Anheuser-Busch InBev owns Busch Light, and MillerCoors owns Miller Lite. On the map, Bud Light's sales dominance is clearly apparent: it covers all of the South and most of the Northeast, along with other random pockets elsewhere. Noting this, Zook and Poorthuis decided to map where tweets mentioning each of these brands were dominant. Tweets about the most popular light beersĬraft beer might be getting more popular, but cheap light beers still rule: in 2013, Bud Light, Coors Light, Miller Lite and Busch Light were four of the top six selling beers (the others were Budweiser and the timeless classic Natural Light).īud light covers all of the south and most of the northeast 2) Bud Light is really, really popular everywhere B ut there also seems to be a definite urban-rural cultural trend reflected in the map, with inland cities like Atlanta and Phoenix dominated by wine tweets as well. The researchers speculate that this is partly driven by wine-growing regions in California, the Northwest, and Upstate New York, and traditional beer-brewing areas in the Midwest. To investigate the geographic trends underlying this split, the geographers analyzed all geotagged tweets sent between June 2012 and May 2013 that mentioned either wine or beer, and mapped which areas had significantly higher numbers of one or the other.Īs you can see, there's a definite pattern going on: most of the east and west coasts seem to prefer wine, or at least have an even split. There's an urban-rural split between wine and beer In August 2013, a poll was released showing that the country is pretty much evenly split between people who prefer wine and those who prefer beer. "It's a distinct population, so it's important to be cognizant of that." 1) Wine is popular on the coasts, beer is popular in the midwest Of course, with all these maps, there's a caveat: " The people who are tweeting are not everybody in the US," Zook says. Their fascinating maps are featured in a chapter of a new textbook, The Geography of Beer. There is an unmistakable geography to beer preferences in America.īy analyzing over one million location-specific tweets related to beer, geographers Matthew Zook and Ate Poorthuis have mapped the geographical patterns hidden in the brews we like to drink.
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