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.”

The restless people who kept moving west and further west had to stop here or step into the ocean: maybe all that restlessness got channeled into innovation?

Viewed from afar, West Coast-style brewing is a phenomenon: audacious, ground-breaking, and hop-heavy. There are communities “ out West” where craft beer outsells the Big Three, where it must be as daunting to open a new brewery as it is to open a new restaurant in New York.

The hard brewing facts support the sense that this is special territory: the four American states and one Canadian province that make up the West Coast of the United States and Canada contain over 30 million people, about 15% of the total. However, they are home to over 440 breweries, microbreweries and brewpubs: about 25% of the total.

The western states and British Columbia gave their countries their first brewpubs and they take home a disproportionate share of national brewing awards. In short, things are happening there.

For 15 years, Celebrator Beer News has been the voice of West Coast beer. We asked Tom Dalldorf, Celebrator’s publisher, to help us make sense of it all.

—AAB

A Stanford University graduate student in Japanese studies had only lunch and a cold beer on his mind that fateful afternoon in July 1965. But when Fritz Maytag ordered his usual Steam Beer, the server suggested that he savor it because the brewery was to be closed.

Fritz, the scion of the Maytag washing machine family, was by his nature positively Jeffersonian in his eclectic pursuit of quality and substance in everything he found worthy. He saw in that quirky beer brewed under primitive conditions something that was distinctly San Francisco and he had to learn more. Thus began an almost single-minded dedication to reviving lost traditions of brewing that is the hallmark of the Anchor Brewing Co.

Fritz dropped by the brewery and discovered that it was indeed to be closed after so many years, having survived even the devastating consequences of Prohibition. He wondered what he could do to help out. With a small investment and a lot of hard work, Fritz became the proud owner of a historic brewing property with rather poor prospects. Even with the San Francisco Chronicle’s Fearless Spectator Charles McCabe singing its praises, Anchor’s Steam Beer was a bastard child of the beer business and an unruly one at that. Fritz set to work cleaning up the brewery and stabilizing the beer.

Eventually, Maytag discovered the adage to be true in beer as it is in wine: the way to make a small fortune is to start with a really big one. This expensive avocation could not continue for long. A new location and some more modern equipment and quality control improved his product to the point where Maytag could actually sleep at night without worrying about the beer going bad.

Anchor produced fewer than 800 barrels of Steam the first year, but demand increased after the quality issues were addressed. Maytag’s research and travels to England and Europe convinced him that other styles might be equally attractive to a country notably devoid of beers of color or flavor. He introduced Liberty Ale in April 1975 to commemorate the midnight ride of Paul Revere, and the beer became so popular that he had to make it a year-round brand. Old Foghorn, a traditional English-style barley wine, was introduced that same year—another first. This was Anchor’s most extreme beer yet. Given its high alcohol and robust flavor profile, it must have been quite a radical move in a beer market awash in an ocean of light industrial adjunct lager.