Life

Why Are We All Drinking So Much Bad Beer?

Apparently I spoke too soon when I said that maybe we were all getting a lot classier yesterday, because today, we’ve got this: According to Twitter, we’re all drinking way too much bad beer. Come on, guys! I thought our happy hours were better than that!

Although at least this information comes to us by way of a textbook about beer. You heard me: Textbook. Beer. Awesome. According to Popular Science, The Geography of Beer “traces the origins of beer and explores flourishing cultures tied to the alcoholic drink.” So how does Twitter fit into all this? One of the chapters, written by Matthew Zook and Ate Poorthius, features the map seen here:

Zook and Poorthius studied a year’s worth of tweets to create this map, working out which brands of light beer are most popular in which sections of the United States. Although there’s a pretty large swathe in the Western U.S. which is sadly lacking in enough data from which to draw any conclusions, we can see pretty clearly who reigns supreme, and where: The East Coast and most of the South are fans of Bud Light; Coors Light is the bad beer of choice on the West Coast; and the Midwest favors Busch and Miller Lite.

Light beer aside (I maintain that beer you can dye green is pretend beer, and there’s nothing you can do to change my mind), The Geography of Beer sounds pretty fascinating; it’s a little pricey (such is the nature of textbooks, even when they’re about beer), but it’s available for purchase now if you’re curious. Bottoms up!

Images: Matthew Zook and Ate Poorthius/Popular Science