CHICO, CA—Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. is celebrating the opening of its new Mills River, North Carolina, brewery by bringing revered craft brewers to North Carolina via a cross-country festival path in 2014. A dozen craft breweries across the U.S., both up-and-comers and noted names, will join Sierra Nevada in the creation of a variety 12-pack—one partner brewery per beer—to be released in summer 2014. A multi-weekend, west-to-east tour of regional festivals will culminate with the Mills River doors opening.

“We want to highlight the success of craft beer, not just our own next step,” said Ken Grossman, Sierra Nevada’s founder. “Craft brewers are a close bunch, and we’ve all helped each other get to this point. This is a fun way to showcase even just a fraction of the talent that’s out there, and somehow 12 beers doesn’t feel like enough. If this weren’t already a logistical mammoth, we’d brew with even more of our great peers.”

The specific travel path for festivals is a work in progress, but in spring 2014, these breweries will visit Chico to develop recipes and begin brewing:

• Allagash Brewing Company, Portland, ME
• Ballast Point Brewing Company, San Diego, CA
• Bell’s Brewery, Inc., Kalamazoo, MI
• Cigar City Brewing, LLC, Tampa, FL
• Firestone Walker Brewing Co., Paso Robles, CA
• New Glarus Brewing Company, New Glarus, WI
• Ninkasi Brewing Company, Eugene, OR
• Oskar Blues Brewing Company, Longmont, CO
• Russian River Brewing Company, Santa Rosa, CA
• Three Floyds Brewing, LLC, Munster, IN
• Victory Brewing Company, Downingtown, PA
• Local brewing community in Asheville, NC

The collaboration will also champion advances in the industry and the greater craft beer communities surrounding the partner breweries.

“We’ve long supported ingredients research, and we hope these beers see success that allows us to further help malt and hops evolve,” said Grossman. “We also aim to highlight the state brewers guilds our partners belong to. It’s a small but important nudge to keep our industry’s momentum strong.”

The idea of collaborative brews is nothing new to Sierra Nevada. Its Beer Camp^® program started in 2008 when a group of distributors wanted to visit Chico and learn how to brew beer. It evolved into a national consumer contest where winners from all over the country head to Chico for a two-day, hands-on brewing session. Sierra Nevada recently reached Beer Camp number 100.

“There are no reins in Beer Camp,” said Grossman. “We typically bring a dozen folks in who don’t know a ton about beer and let them have at it. This time we‘ll be brewing 12 beers with as many pros. It has the potential to be epic.”

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.”