Men’s Health magazine has long had a dubious Metrogrades article where they use a mixture of arbitrary stats (in this case, driving deaths, underage drinking, rates of alcoholic chronic diseases, etc.) to rank American cities from 1 to 100, listing the top and bottom ten.
The booziest cities, in the Jan/Feb 2021 issue? Reno, Denver, Billings, Milwaukee, Fargo, Madison, Portland (ME), Toledo, Washington and #10 Charleston.
Least boozy cities: Memphis, Miami, Jackson, Salt Lake City, Newark, Atlanta, Birmingham, San Jose, Orlando and #91 New York.
Say what? I haven’t spent a lot of time in Canada South (just wait… rubs hands… looks at clock expectantly)… the US, but Miami? Really? The one time I went, the bars were freakin’ packed. And open till 5am.
Can one take this list seriously? (Of course not. But I’d like to hear further discusion).
Absolutely, we’ve got a brewery, distillery or a pot shop on every corner. Enough people moved here when pot was legalized that we didn’t even see a drop in alcohol consumption. Though there were rumors that there are more pot shops than starbucks in several major cities in the state.
I’m not surprised to see denver on the list I track per capita spirits consumption by state for a lot of the business plans we write and Colorado is always in the top 10 in spirits consumption and typically top 5 for beer.
If the stats are mostly connected to the residents, not to the tourists, you may well find the big tourist cities like Vegas, Miami, etc,. ranking fairly low.
IOW: just because tourists drink a lot doesn’t mean they’re crowding Vegas’s hospitals with cirrhosis cases. Or being arrested for underage drinking.
Fun fact: Las Vegas per capita water consumption is about triple that of an ordinary city. Why is a city in a desert one of the biggest water consumers is the USA?
Answer: It’s a trick stat. Total consumption of residents + tourists divided by the headcount of residents gives the per capita figure a big boost. And City of Las Vegas proper has a lot of hotels and comparatively not a lot of residential areas. Further skewing the stats.
Most of the lists of heaviest-drinking cities I’ve seen have more Wisconsin cities on the list, but it looks like the Men’s Health list may have only focused on bigger cities.
This 2018 article from USA Today looks at CDC data on binge drinking and heavy drinking, which has ten Wisconsin cities in the top 20 for drinking, including all of the top four spots. My home town of Green Bay is #1 on that list.
If you look at the stat that matters (bars per capita, none of that fancy-pants methodology for me), only three of the top ten cities are in what passes for the Great White North (upper Midwest and upstate New York); San Francisco was #1 in recent rankings and Las Vegas did indeed make the top ten.
On a statewide basis, living on the tundra in the depths of winter has historically made people booze-prone; North Dakota consistently leads the rankings, followed by Montana, Wisconsin and South Dakota*.
*As a former South Dakotan, I am proud (?) to say that Deadwood is the drunkest city in the state, with approximately 1 bar for every 100 people. That may have something to do with the annual influx of tourists and bikers.
Denver has seemingly long been an alcohol-centric city.
Even many various local “Fast-Casual” places there (similar to national chains like Chipolte, Panda Express or Panera Bread) often have full bars, (some even complete with Happy Hour specials) not just wine and beer, which I think is pretty unusual in most American cities.
Yep, these were exactly the two cities I thought of when I saw the thread title.
After reading over the whole thread and then re-reading the OP, it now makes more sense to me – drunk driving will happen a lot more in cities where you actually drive to bars rather than walk or take public transit; rates of alcoholic chronic diseases will only capture residents and not tourists.
But when I hear the term “America’s Booziest Cities,” what I think of, and what I would presume many other people also think of, is cities with a big drinking culture, such as New Orleans or Key West.
Having lived at both low and high latitudes, I’m pretty sure that the places with long, dark winters will always be the top booze-swilling champions. Southern party towns just can’t compete.
