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.”

America, writes Sifakis, was once truly gifted with nonconformists: hermits and itinerant preachers, flat-earth believers, nostrum peddlers and hoarders of string. Today, he claims, society is less likely to tolerate its eccentrics: “If you are poor and act bizarrely, you’re crazy and perhaps dangerous.”

Sifakis, if he had examined the craft brewing industry, might have changed his mind. The country is dotted with small brewers who entered the market without the benefit of a consumer survey. Their products defy stylistic guidelines. Their labels and packaging are over the top. Their marketing practices are unorthodox, to say the least.

Their numbers include a southern Californian entrepreneur who believes customers should earn the right to drink his beer; a stubborn German immigrant who established the East Coast’s first brewpub in a semidry town in Southern Baptist country; brewers who adhere to the Neinheitsgebot instead of the Reinheitsgebot, using nontraditional ingredients like saffron, rose petals, even garlic.

And they’re not only surviving, they’re thriving.

Magical Mystery Tour

Vermonters have an independent streak. Senator Jim Jeffords made that clear when he bolted the Republican Party, tipping the balance of power in the US Senate. To honor Jeffords, Alan Newman—president of the Magic Hat Brewing Co. in South Burlington, VT—released a commemorative brew, an English mild dubbed Jeezum Jim. (“Jeezum” is a mild epithet in the local dialect.) “They’re really getting a kick out of it,” he says of Jeffords’s staff.

Newman is quite the nonconformist himself. I met him for the first time in April 2000 at the National Beer Wholesalers/Brewers Joint Legislative Conference in Washington, DC. With his flowing beard and floral-print shirt, he stood out like a mast in a sea of business suits. Newman made one concession to decorum: he wore shoes. “I frequently go barefoot,” he said.

Before he founded Magic Hat with partner Bob Johnson in 1994, Newman already had six start-ups to his credit (“a serial entrepreneur” is what the Wall Street Journal called him). His previous venture was Seventh Generation, a mail-order firm supplying environmentally friendly products like recycled writing paper and water-saving shower heads. Alan’s hippie sensibilities are currently reflected in his beer labels, which lean toward surrealistic, occasionally vertigo-inducing designs.

Magic Hat’s best-selling beer is 9, a “not quite pale ale” with a spritz of apricot essence. The hops and fruit meld seamlessly. “I can look people straight in the eye and say, ‘You’ll never have another beer like this,’” he boasts.

Newman has an affinity for the number nine: he markets his beers in nine-packs as well as the usual increments of six. Ask him about 9, however, and he’ll tell you it’s named neither for the Beatles’ Revolution No. 9, nor for the rock ’n roll standard, “Love Potion No. 9.” Newman cautions against reading deep meanings into his beer monikers, which include Jinx (a peat-smoked ale), Blind Faith (an IPA) and Humble Patience (an Irish-style red ale). “If we ever get famous, we’re going to have to hire someone to write stories to go with the names.”

The Magic Hat website at www.magichat.com is a psychedelic experience in itself. In addition to the t-shirts and mugs for sale, you’ll see a very unusual collateral item: prophylactic devices. “Instead of going into a bar with jiggly women in skimpy t-shirts, I give away condoms,” says Newman, who works with the AIDS awareness group, Vermont Cares.

“Our goal is to keep our customers alive and healthy,” he explains.” If we support the community, the community will support us.”

Magic Hat paced New England breweries with 21 percent growth last year, boosting output to 26,000 barrels. “My goal is to be an international brand,” says Newman. “We’ve got a quirky niche and I think our brands will resonate with people in Athens, GA, as well as in Athens, Greece.”

The Brewer with the Midas Touch

When Dogfish Head Brewings and Eats opened in 1995 in the resort community of Rehoboth Beach, DE, it was probably the smallest brewery in America. Owner Sam Calagione brewed twice a day, six days a week, in 12-gallon batches. “When you brew that often, you get bored with the same recipes,” he recalls. So Calagione began to tweak the formulas with whatever was handy in the kitchen. That’s how he developed his penchant for oddball beers.

Calagione is basking in the limelight for Midas Touch, a spiced golden ale inspired by a beverage served at the funeral of the legendary King Midas some 2,700 years ago. Based on an analysis of the residue on ancient pottery shards, the recipe calls for Muscat grapes, honey and saffron. The beer—which tastes something like a pear cider, but with a drier finish—is available in clear-glass, corked champagne bottles throughout the Mid-Atlantic states and in a few more remote markets like Chicago and California.

“There’s no use in doing what’s been done before,” says Sam. His Chicory Stout includes a pinch of St. John’s wort, an herb said to have antidepressant properties. Raison d’Etre, which is vying with Dogfish Head’s Shelter Pale Ale for best-selling brand, is a Scotch-style ale brewed with beet sugar and green raisins. Immort-Ale is a barley wine-strength ale flavored with vanilla beans, maple syrup and juniper berries.