It was at this point that I wondered if it’s possible to drink beer in wine country. Sounds like an oxymoron, but don’t beer drinkers get a chance to enjoy their preferred beverages, after their oenophile partners have dragged them around tasting rooms all day?

The answer is yes. Each of the big wine countries in North America also offers up a good helping of breweries―and the good news is that you don’t have to search very hard to find them.

And forget yourselves for a moment―think of the wine makers. Despite what Hollywood and romanticized books and articles will have us believe, for many of them, there’s only one thing that hits the spot at the end of the day and that’s a nice cold beer.

In fact, as many brewers pointed out, the saying is that it takes a lot of great beer to make good wine.

California

The logical place to start with any discussion of wine in this continent is the most illustrious wine country, Napa Valley.

Both Napa and Sonoma counties are peppered with breweries, and one of the best known is Downtown Joe’s American Grill and Brewhouse in the town of Napa. “People come to the valley and want to taste wine but their whole life is not wine,” said Colin Kaminksi, the pub’s brewer. So, they typically come at both ends of the wine-tasting day, he said―for breakfast and for a change of pace after a day in the vines.

Situated in a historic building on the banks of the Napa River, Downtown Joe’s offers seven regular draft beers, the most popular being Tail Waggin’ American Amber and Lazy Summer American Wheat, and an eighth beer that rotates. The specials tend to depend on Kaminski’s whim―“if I want to explore a different hop, malt or style,” he said. “And that way, I can decide if that element becomes part of one of our regular ales.”

The pub is more British style than American, a very social place where everyone interacts. There’s regular live music and outdoor patios.

Thirty miles to the north, in Calistoga, is the Napa Valley Brewing Co., the Calistoga Inn Restaurant & Brewery.

Here there are four beers on tap: an American wheat, a pilsner, a red ale, and a porter. The wheat and the pilsner are the best sellers in the summer, while the red ale is a heartier winter drink. The porter, according to head brewer Brad Simisloff, is consistent throughout the year and ages very well. Simisloff also rotates in three to five other beers regularly, so there are always seven to nine tap offerings.

“I’m fascinated by the history of beer styles and how they came about so I’m as authentic as I can,” he said. As an example, he uses Belgian malt for his Belgian-style beers and abbey-style yeast.

He also has fun playing around with his tripels, adding flavors like orange peel and grains of paradise, a seed that is spicy with a little fruit. “I make all the spices subdued, however, so they’re just an aftertaste,” he pointed out.

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.”