The Session #42 Announcement: A Special Place, A Special Beer

The Session is a monthly collaboration of beer bloggers and writers who write from their own perspective on a single topic. Each participant posts their contribution on their site on the first Friday of the month, with The Session host picking the topic and summarizing all the contributions. This month, The Session host is, well, me!

Beer has been so tightly linked to geography throughout it's long history, we tend to forget. Many beer styles are named after the cities, countries, and regions they originally came from. Two of the best ways I've found to explore a new place are to run around in it, and to sample the beer from it. And like many in the craft beer community, I constantly exhort anyone who will listen to support their local brewery, while simultaneously seeking out beers from distant lands that are new, novel, and exotically foreign. The Session provides a unique opportunity to explore this connection between the beer in our glasses and the place it comes from with perspectives from all over the world

So I ask for this 42nd Session that you write about a special place in your life, and a beer or brewery that connects you to that place. It can be the beer from your childhood home, a place you once lived, your current hometown, a memorable vacation you once took, or a place you've always wanted to go to but never had the chance. Please take a few moments to think about the how the beer connects you to this place, and share this with us. Of course, the definition of "place" is rather open ended, and in some cases, highly debatable, so it will be interesting to see the responses on what constitutes a place.

You can either provide the link to your Session contribution with a comment to this post, or you can e-mail it to me at "derrickwp (at) earthlink (dot) net". E-mailed submissions in text form will be posted on this site with credit given to the author should anyone wish to participate this way.

I look forward to what you all write on August 6th, and will post the summary a few days later. And don't forget, The Session is always a great reason enjoy a bottle or two from that special place and tell us about it. Cheers!

Surprising Results of Northern California Brewing Geography from a Simple Analysis

I always wondered how brewing activity is tied to geography. So to understand this more, I rather naively started looking at some of the data on beer brewing licenses by the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control for each county to see what I might discover. And if I say so myself, a very simple, straightforward analysis does indicate some general truths, and also raises good questions to pursue for further analysis.

The California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control produces a report of the number of alcohol licenses per county. So simply looking up the number Type 1 (Brewery), Type 23 (Small Brewery) and Type 75 (Brewpub) licenses issued to each county, a rough idea of the brewing activity of the county can be determined. This may not be your ideal gauge of brewing activity per county, and it isn't mine either. It doesn't take into account quantity, where data is harder to find, or quality of the beer, which is rather subjective. But simply taking a count of the number of brewing locations within a county and a good starting point for "back of the envelope" calculations. So I started by looking at nine California counties that border the San Francisco Bay (San Francisco, Marin, Sonoma, Napa, Solano, Contra Costa, Alameda, Santa Clara, and San Mateo), added a couple nearby ones with demonstrable brewing activity (Santa Cruz, Mendocino), and threw in San Diego county just for grins, seeing how an California county everyone would agrees has plenty of breweries in it, would stack up against the others. (For those unfamiliar with these California counties, here's a handy map.)

After determining the Type 1, Type 23, and Type 75 licenses issued by the State of California, I took the sum of these numbers, and then divided the population of each county by the total number of brewing licenses in it, and rounded to resulting county residents per brewery to the closest thousand. After each county residents per brewery is listed, I've put the number of Type 1, Type 23, Type 75, and county population in parenthesis in the following format: (Type 1 / Type 23 / Type 75 / County Population). In order of fewest residents per brewery, here is what I found:

Medocino (17,000...( 2 / 3 / 0 / 86,221)
Napa 22,000...( 0 / 1 / 5 / 133,433)
Sonoma 29,000...( 0 / 14 / 2 / 466,741)
Santa Cruz 51,000...( 0 / 5 / 0 / 253,137)
Marin 62,000...( 0 / 3 / 1 / 248,794)
San Diego 79,000...( 0 / 24 / 14 / 3,001,072)
San Francisco 81,000...( 1 / 5 / 4 / 808,976)
Alameda 134,000...( 1 / 10 / 0 / 1,474,368)
Santa Clara 136,000...( 2 / 7 / 4 / 1,764,499)
San Mateo 142,000...( 0 / 5 / 0 / 712,690)
Solano 204,000...( 1 / 1 / 0 / 407,515)
Contra Costa 206,000...( 0 / 5 / 0 / 1,029,703)

Let's consider that 20,000-30,000 people per brewery figure for a moment. That's one brewery for each small city in the county. And how many of you honest expected Napa County to rank second on this list? Three things seemed to jump out of the numbers, at least to me.

Three Distinct Groups of Counties
It was surprising to me to see the counties neatly organize themselves into three groups. There is the group of Lower Density Counties, that includes
Medocino, Napa, Sonoma, Santa Cruz, and Marin Counties. All of these counties have a fair amount of wine making activity as well. Next are the two High Density Urban Counties of San Francisco and San Diego, which surprisingly have almost the exact same density of breweries. The last group of counties, bringing up the rear are Alameda, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Solano, and Contra Costa counties, which are the Largely Suburban Bay Area Counties.


Outside San Francisco, the Number of Residents per Brewery is Surprisingly Uniform
I didn't really expect this, thinking there would be more concentration around San Francisco and Oakland, but that wasn't the case.

The South Bay Isn't Quite the Beer Desert Everyone Says It Is
I've suspected this for a few months now, and it was part of my motivation for doing the analysis. Compared to most counties in the Bay Area, Santa Clara holds it's own, thank you very much. If there is any beer desert in Northern California, it is the Northeastern Counties of Solano and Contra Costa.

I'm encouraged these results suggest a number of questions to delve further, which are:

1. Does this rather simple approach work as we expand to other regions? I really didn't expect such a nice, neat arrangement of counties. What refinements can we make for it to be more reliable?



2. Is there a relation between wine making and brewing? If we look at other California counties with a lot of wine making activity, would we see similar results in brewing activity? What about wine making regions of Oregon, Washington and New York states?



3. Can we look at other urban areas in the United States and compare the residents per brewery in these area, and see what cities emerge as particularly active brewing cities. Of course, cities like San Francisco, San Diego, Portland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Boston have reputations as brewing meccas. How do these reputations square with the data?
   

I'm looking forward to seeing conclusions we can make about brewing and geography and if this kind of stuff interests you, then stay tuned. And of course, if anyone has any comment, questions or sugestions, I look forward to hearing them.