In Philadelphia, Russell is Joe Sixpack, a man who turned beer into a full time job: reason enough to admire him. He has also rather brazenly declared his hometown “America’s Best Beer Drinking City,” and slapped that tagline on a 10-day beer festival he helped organize called Philly Beer Week.

Mr. Sixpack’s boast doesn’t sit well in Portland, Seattle and San Francisco. At the Brewer’s Association in Boulder, CO, officials stopped short of censuring him, saying only that Russell ought to be prepared to defend his claim over a place like, say, Denver or Boulder or Fort Collins. In a column that ran in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a day before the festival started, fellow beer writer Bob Batz Jr. wasn’t so sure that Philly was even the best beer drinking city in Pennsylvania.

Before we go on and I’m exposed, I ought to confess that I like Russell a lot. I wrote about him for another magazine and, afterward, took him up on an invitation to let him convince me about Philly. After four days with friends hoisting glasses in the South Philly Taproom, the Pub on Passyunk East (POPE), Capone’s, the Old Eagle Tavern, Monk’s, the Standard Tap, Azure, the Royal Tavern and, for good measure, a last Racer 5 again at POPE, I was in no shape to disagree with him.

Now, before you reach for your bung starter, realize that Mr. Sixpack has done us all a big favor. He has helped stir a national discussion about what makes a beer city good or great or even the best. We’ve had these debates from the time someone took note that there was more than one microbrewery in a city or that a neighborhood had suddenly sprouted several bars with exotic tap handles. Admit it. We love to fight over the best places to drink beer.

People used to pester Michael Jackson all the time for his favorite places. In 2000, he wrote that there were exactly seven great beer cities in America: Austin, Boston, Denver, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle. Baltimore, Chicago and New York might be contenders, he said at the time.

Just two years ago, Celebrator Beer News declared that not only did it know that there were 10 great beer cities but knew what order they came in: Portland, followed by San Francisco, Denver, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Diego, Washington, D.C./Baltimore, Boston and a tie between Chicago and New York. The Web is choked with Top 10 lists.

Some of this is just spreadsheet work: numbers of microbreweries, brewpubs, good beers bars and homebrew clubs, population ratios and all that. But if it were merely a matter of mathematics, all of the lists would be exactly the same.

What is missing from all of the calculating is what Paul Gatza, the director of the Brewers Association, calls “the mystical experiences that people talk about.” It’s that heady feeling, impossible to quantify, that you are in a place among people who care as passionately about beer as you do. It is by this giddily subjective standard that Don Russell can claim Philadelphia’s supremacy. “Other towns, you sit in a bar, you could be anywhere in the United States,” Russell wrote in one of his recent columns. “You can’t drink beer in this city and not feel Philadelphia.”

And so, it is by Russell’s standard that I have been liberated to create my own, altogether different, list of beer cities. Without getting out the calculator, they are cities that have reached a certain critical mass in the availability of good beer. Unlike those Top 10 cities, they are not often recognized outside of their regions. Some are established stalwarts. Some are audacious upstarts. But they are all capable of making the argument that beer is an intrinsic part of their culture.

So as to ensure hurt feelings, I deliberately left off this list some fine beer cities: Milwaukee, my hometown, where I’ve probably had as much good beer as any one place in my lifetime; Baltimore, with its bewitching combination of locale, ethnicity and old and new brewers; St. Louis, where a certain brewing behemoth overshadows a vibrant craft brewing scene; and Austin, the city where my wife, Susan, and I have raised our children and where a major microbrewery (Celis) and a core of brewpubs have closed since the city made Michael Jackson’s list. While well known for beer, none of these has the same dynamism and momentum of the cities on my list. “Beauty,” as Gatza says, “is in the eye of the beerholder.”

We remember the bad old days—before the revolution—when beer variety was non-existent, when bars and stores offered us the choice between Mainstream Lager A and Mainstream Lager B (and C and D, in more adventurous places).

Then came the thrill of discovery as the beer selection opened up, thanks to enterprising brewers and unconventional importers. Beer didn’t have to mean standard lager; there were rich European brewing traditions that offered us scores of alternative flavors.

Nor did beer have to be produced by huge, factory-like installations. It could be made by scrappy entrepreneurs, brewing on their own with cobbled-together equipment, distributing by pick-up truck and promoting their brews one convert at a time.

It was, indeed, a revolution: an upheaval that overturned the conventional way of thinking in the beer world. And beer writers loved the imagery of rebellion and revolt.

But (Fidel aside) revolutions come to an end. A new view of reality replaces the old. What we think of as “the American Beer Revolution” probably concluded in the nineties.

For beer aficionados, the new reality means sixty or seventy distinct styles of beer in American markets. But outside specialist circles, the new reality actually means that instead of ten mainstream lagers on the shelves, it’s probably nine mainstream lagers and one pale ale.

Despite playing a minor role, pale ales, amber ales and specialty lagers are now members of the beer industry establishment. For a small but significant group of beer drinkers, these are the beers they reach for when they “feel like a beer.”

These beers don’t raise eyebrows at the corner bar, they have a place in the convenience store cooler, and their drinkers aren’t making political statements. The beers are delicious and commercially successful.

Why brew anything else?

Recently, I made Portland my base of operations for a sightseeing tour of Maine’s coast. The timing was perfect: most of the tourists had gone home, but the summer sun had decided to extend its stay in northern New England.

My first stop was the historic Old Port, the home of Three Dollar Dewey’s (241 Commercial St.), where Maine’s beer renaissance began. This was a dream come true for the famed beer researcher, Alan Eames, who’s traveled to the ends of the Earth in search of exotic brews. Eames’s pub, with a menu emphasizing British ales, opened for business in 1981. It’s been credited with educating a generation of drinkers about good beer.

Three Dollar Dewey’s takes its name from the prostitutes who followed gold miners to the Klondike, as legend has it, with a menu of services reading “$1 Lookie, $2 Feelie, $3 Dewey.” But the pub’s atmosphere is more reminiscent of Yorkshire than the Yukon. Armed with the Boston Globe (there’s a rack full of reading material on the wall) and a big bowl of popcorn, I sat at the bar and savored some Maine microbrew. Most of the three dozen draft choices are brewed in the region; there are also blackboard specials, along with the “Irish Blacklist” of combination drinks made with Guinness.