UPDATE: Feast Your Eyes: The United States of Beer

---

With the Super Bowl coming up this weekend, the Houston Press has come up with this handy map to the United States of Beer. For those of you disappointed by your home state's brew, the newspaper explained that its choices were based on out-of-state reach and recognition, meaning, for example, that although Victory undoubtedly makes a better beer, Yuengling represents Pennsylvania. In some states, the decision-making process was particularly tough, as the Press explains:

Florida? South Dakota? Kentucky? These aren't places that one naturally associates with beer, as the map and our choices demonstrate. We finally settled on Bud Light for Kentucky as it's traditionally the most favored beer in beer cheese, a regional favorite. Florida gets saddled with MGD Light 64 because it's the beer we imagine bikini-clad Miami Beach babes drinking to stay slim.

And still other states have frustratingly outdated liquor laws, like Alabama and West Virginia. Those states were penalized by being "awarded" awful, low-ABV brews like Keystone Light and Natural Light, as these are some of the only beers that can lawfully be sold in these pitiful states.

\n

All I would add is that you should definitely not take this map as encouragement to stick to widely-distributed products of industrial brewing's big three—Anheuser-Busch, Coors, or Miller—when there are more than 1,600 wonderful independent microbreweries dotted around the country, just waiting to be discovered. Drinking local should taste as good as eating local, after all.

***UPDATES***

With emotions running this high, we decided to create our own map: the United States of GOOD Beer. And we want to get it up in time for Superbowl Sunday, since Americans will be drinking nearly 500 Olympic-sized swimming pools-full of beer during the game.

Well, GOOD readers, your very adamant and state-proud voices have been heard! Check out our map of the United States of GOOD Beer and hop on over to our Kickstarter campaign page to help fund a limited edition poster and get one for yourself!

Illustration by Monica Fuentes for the Houston Press.