Does Rochester have the best beer scene in the country? This one person on Reddit thinks so.

A random Rochester subreddit poster got me thinking about how you measure the best. So I asked some experts for some perspective (and reached my own conclusion).

Lurking on Reddit is one of my favorite daily activities. Specifically, I love anonymously scouring the Rochester subreddit. It’s a glorious place for gossip, batshit opinions, beautiful pictures, and thought-provoking discussions about newsworthy events.

A recent post titled “Rochester may just be the best per-capita beer city in the world” piqued my interest and has had me really pondering where we stand among beer scene heavyweights like Portland (both Oregon and Maine), Denver, San Diego, Asheville, and Grand Rapids.

To get an idea how our beer scene is viewed by outsiders or at least to get some insight into how others tackle the question of what’s best, I reached out to some of my very smart industry friends. That included Kate Bernot, a Montana-based drinks writer (who I think is the best in the country). Her work has appeared all over. She also works as as a writer and editor for Good Beer Hunting and is president of the North American Guild of Beer Writers. I also chatted with Bryan Roth, a Geneva native, a past NAGBW president, and currently the managing editor of GBH. There are no two perspectives I value more than theirs.

Both Bernot and Roth were kind enough to humor my off-the-wall request: responding to an anonymous subreddit post.

The post begins, “Sure, Chicago, NYC they’re great beer cities. But when it comes to density of craft breweries and great beer in a 40min driving radius of city center it is quite possibly the best that exists in the world.”

My initial reaction was “heck no.” We’re not even close to being the best. Other spots surpass us in per capita measurements or density. Could we one day get there? Maybe. Will we realistically ever be the best in the country? Probably not. Are we even the best in New York state? Ehhhh, maybe. It’s close, at least subjectively. And how do you even measure the best? Questions, questions, questions. That’s why I wanted to reach out to some folks I trusted and valued.

When user Highgyjiggy claimed that all 30 breweries in Monroe County are always busy, I know that isn’t this case. Some breweries have closed. Others are currently for sale. Visit at certain times and you might be the only person in a taproom. This is an exceedingly weird and anxious time in the beer industry. The industry is still relatively healthy, but growth has slowed (or is stagnant in some cases) and optimism has certainly dimmed.

From Bryan Roth…

Cheekily, Roth noted that Rochester has to battle it out with Buffalo and Syracuse for the best in upstate crown before one can declare a nationwide victory. (I think Rochester can safely declare victory over Syracuse.)

“A question that has been rattling around my head for months: ‘What happens when every city is America's best beer city?’” Roth shared. He noted that esteemed beer writer Jeff Alworth, author of the influential Beervana blog looked at this very question back in June. Alworth offered, “But there’s also a more subtle problem: if we had available stats for anything we wanted, which ones would we use? In other words, how do you define a good beer city?”

Alworth then tried to define or build a better set of data or output through which to tackle these questions. He asked, “If all that makes pretty obvious sense for food—and I don’t think it’s controversial—why do we ignore so many of the same dimensions when considering beer?”

Roth came at it from a similar perspective, “If you can find a publication from USA Today or CNN to Real Estate Watch that lists some collection of cities as ‘best,’ does that mean we just have the most, best cities ever? Or the idea of what constitutes ‘best’ is now at the whim of SEO-generated lists or enough capacity of local voices to deem whatever their city is as capital-B ‘Best’?” Lots to chew on there. (Or better yet, lots to sip on.)

To answer the eternal question, Roth said he thinks about three factors: 1. Number of options; 2. Quality of those options; 3. Availability.

In his own words, he breaks it down like this:

• Number of options: I'm not looking for dozens of breweries in one municipality, but I am looking for enough different businesses that offer differentiation and excitement around different styles, flavor experiences, or even drinking experiences in different physical spaces. A best beer city won't have 15 breweries in various warehouse districts. (Aside: Rochester now has 14 breweries and they’re all situated on the eastern side of the Genesee River.)

• Quality of options: I need beer that I can feel excited about. Step 1 is the diversity of options to turn to, step 2 is knowing they'll taste good. Simply having a bunch of breweries each making a dozen beers for their taproom doesn't guarantee either of those things.

• Availability in that city: I love a walkable city. To me what makes a city “best” is allowing for people to access its beer in easy ways. Sidewalks, public transportation, “brewery districts,'“ available parking. These are all things that help encourage people to go to the places that would make a city “best.”

Rochester scores pretty well for the number of breweries, variety of options, and also quality of those beers. Is there still some bad beer in Monroe County? Absolutely. But the majority of the options here are quite good, even if those breweries don’t make the styles of beer you wanna drink. When it comes to availability, Rochester doesn’t rate that highly, at least to me. Our city isn’t particularly walkable and we certainly need better public transportation infrastructure. But Bryan’s perspective offers a lot for us to ponder.

From Kate Bernot…

“Oh yes, the perennial ‘best beer scene’ lists,” Bernot wrote in an email to me. “I am always perplexed by these, as they so rarely give any hint as to how these rankings are achieved or what the methodology is.”

Noting that she’s never been to Rochester, she recused herself from answering if we have the best beer scene here.

She continued, “I would be very hesitant, as a publication, to even attempt to rank beer scenes across the U.S. How does a publication even go about this? Of course there are quantitative criteria: breweries per capita, number of Great American Beer Festival or World Beer Cup medals per city, etc. But any beer fan will tell you that's not what makes a city great (or not) for beer: It's about the intangible, qualitative factors. It's about how friendly the bars and taprooms are, how walkable they are from each other, how quirky the local styles are, and how good the city's beer is on the whole. It's also about an individual's experience of that city. A beer traveller could easily have a fairly boring visit to, say, brewery-heavy Denver, but have an amazing experience drinking beer in Tulsa. Because of that, I question what these beer city rankings are for, beyond generating angry clicks or soliciting lazy reposts.” 

It’s obviously subjective. It’s nearly impossible to qualitatively measure something like this. And in this case, it’s best to let Bernot just speak for herself here, because her conclusion is spot on.

“There is no way any single person, or even a publication, has visited every primary, secondary, and tertiary city in the U.S. and drank their beers. So again, these rankings are based on amorphous mixes of qualitative and quantitative criteria that are at best opaque and at worst totally meaningless.” 

There’s no easy answer here. (Really, there isn’t an answer here at all.) But I feel pretty confident in determining Rochester doesn’t have the best beer scene in the country or on the planet. We’re pretty awesome, but we’re not the best.

User Highgyjiggy concludes, “Okay rant over beer lovers I hope you can appreciate what we have.” And at the end of it all, I think we can all appreciate that perspective. Rochester beer is awesome. It’s getting better. It will certainly change a lot over the coming years (most likely with closures and consolidations), but the foundation is in place for a beer scene we can all be proud of.

All of this from a random Rochester Reddit post, too.