Which state has the best beer?

There's an old joke about American beer being like doing the dirty in a boat - I'll let you figure out the punchline - but American beer does surprisingly well both in sales and in awards, when in international competitions. This is even more true when you consider American craft beer production was wiped out thanks to prohibition, and a lot of know-how was quickly lost.

Two beer journalists decided to find out which state in the US gathered the most medals in beer competitions. They plotted it out in a lovely map, which I'll repost here.

The answer to who was the best, unsurprisingly, was California. Actually, I was a little surprised, since Oregon and Washington are collectively referred to as "Beervaria" due to their large number of microbreweries. But these numbers don't take into account the fact that, say, there's many people in California, and no so many people in South Dakota. That's why Strangemaps - a neat little blog I just found - reshuffled things for medals per million people.

1. Colorado – 64.4
2. Oregon – 42.5
3. Wisconsin – 38.6
4. Washington – 16.2
5. Missouri – 15
6. Pennsylvania – 13.5
7. Massachusetts – 12.6
8. California – 12.8
9. Texas – 5.6
10. New York – 5.1

But! cried StrangeMaps' readers. You just reshuffled! You didn't see if anyone would make the top 10. A little math later, and Alaska quickly sits on the top of the heap with 78.68 medals per million people - heads above California and nearly double Oregon.

What really surprised me was that Alaskan Brewing Co. is such a winning brewery. If I'm reading their numbers right, they have the most medals for someone who wouldn't be considered a macro-brew. More than Deschutes, long one of the best craft beer producers in the US.

Definitely something to drink about.