My loved one has many wonderful Wisconsin stories from his childhood spent in the north woods near Eagle Lake. He remembers being able to walk into Grady’s Waukegan Tavern as a kid and if your chin could reach above the bar you could get a small beer with your hotdog and chips lunch. Just one, then be on your way. 
Whereas Wisconsiners weirdly want whimsical “where words”, with Winnebago whispers, why wouldn’t willing workers welcome warm, whopping whiskeys with wholesome water when weak, wan? Whenever woke? Wasting wonderful wildfire would widely worry wise Western workforces. Withdrawal wounds would weigh weakly when wooden workplaces wear wildly. Wrong? Windbags? Whoa! Winners! Whiskey waters widely warm wounds. Withstand whatever winters wrought! Wrong, women? Whassup! Whatchamacallit?
Wow! one wendered wordless 
I am SO glad that the Life of Bwian sketch is on YouTube or I would have had an earworm for the next day.
Cool!
Sounds like a Sconnie story all right. Underage beer is considered healthy and normal down to about age 8 or so, if it’s supplied by mom and dad. The family Tavern Culture in this state is strong indeed.
I’d think to properly determine the booziest city, you’d have to have distributor and manufacturer records- they’d tell you the whole picture- bars, homes, restaurants, etc… independent of weird local laws and the like.
I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that some places have relatively few bars due to restrictive laws, and others have a lot due to customs. Or some places do a lot of home drinking, etc… But the actual sales figures across all the retail channels would tend to show the picture in spite of that stuff.
And you could look at seasonal variations as well; I’m sure that South Padre Island shows some insane numbers for about a month in the spring, but on average I’d bet the place is unremarkable.
Just to note that the USA Today ranking appears to be using four measures:
- Percent of adults who drink to excess
- Percent of driving deaths involving alcohol
- Estimated number of bars and restaurants per 100,000 population
- Median household income
Of those four, only the third is purely related to out-of-home consumption of alcohol, and only the second and third would be substantially influenced by drinking among tourists and visitors to the area.
Sure, but those are all pretty poor proxies for “boozy”. The first one is almost certainly some sort of survey that could suffer from selection bias, the second could be very skewed by the presence of effective public transit or walkable neighborhoods, and the fourth doesn’t have any real bearing on anything that I can see, unless there’s some correlation between drinking and income.
That’s why I’m saying distributor level sales figures would be best- you could come up with some kind of drinks per person metric or something.
It’s actually from a CDC study.
But, regardless, while you’re right that distributor info might give a more precise picture, it’s also something that is probably difficult to get at and tabulate, as it’s largely going to be privately-owned data.
Eagle Lake is not in Wisconsins north woods, it’s in the southeast in Racine County. Are you sure you didn’t mean Eagle River, which is way up north?
But then again, you mention Waukegan which is actually in northeast Illinois. Your post confuses me.
Could mean Spread Eagle Lake in Florence County, up nort dere.
And I found reference to a Mr. Pavlik formerly operated the Waukegan Tavern near Eagle River back in the 1950’s
Exactly and that’s the one and only QtM.
I misnamed Eagle River, St Germaine to be even more exact. He didn’t know why Grady named it so, hasn’t been back for decades. Lived on Dam lake, one of a chain of lakes part of Wisconsin (?) river flowage .
Yep. Gotta get them right or Google Maps is taking you somewhere else.
Our “up nort” when I was a kid in the 60’s and 70’s was in Price County outside of Phillips where my Uncle owned land. There was a tavern/gas station (yep) on the corner of Route 111 and state hwy 13. We’d go in there to buy red “licorice” . It was a nickel for a 16 inch whip. And it wasn’t Twizzlers. It was Switzers or something like that. And when you asked for licorice the bar tender would say “liquor shit? You want liquor shit?”
And if they knew your parents you could get this mini glass (maybe 3 ounces, if that) of tap. Usually Rhinelander beer which did indeed taste as fresh as the north woods because it tasted like it had Pine Sol in it!
Well, there is the question of how sober one must be to come up with the following. I wonder if Wisconsiners get tired of hearing:
My name is Yon Yonson,
I live in Wisconsin.
I work in a lumber yard there.
The people I meet as
I walk down the street,
They say “Hello!”
I say “Hello!”
They say “What’s your name.”
This charming WWII era establishment
is a few miles out into ruralia from where I lived at the edge of suburbia. It wasn’t that many years ago they took the gas pumps out; there were old, dead, but still there as late as about 2010. Stop in for a car fill-up, a tummy fill-up, and a pitcher of the cheap stuff to wash it all down. Ahhh, the Good Old Days!