What tweets say about beer preferences across the US
May 7, 2014, 6:25 PM | Updated: 6:25 pm
PHOENIX — Two guys went through the painstaking task of analyzing Twitter to map out beer preferences all across the continental U.S.
Geographers Matthew Zook and Ate Poorthuis scoured “over one million location-specific tweets related to beer,” according to Vox. Their research can be found as one chapter in the new textbook “The Geography of Beer.”
Before you get all riled up over their results, Zook emphasizes that all the data they used was solely gathered from the social media site Twitter.
“The people who are tweeting are not everybody in the U.S.,” Zook says. “It’s a distinct population, so it’s important to be cognizant of that.”
The geographers’ findings showed the following:
Wine trumps beer on both coasts, but not in the Midwest.
Local take: More than half of Arizona prefers “a bit of both” wine and beer, but Central Arizona favors wine.
(Almost) everybody loves Bud Light
Local take: Not surprisingly, the majority of Arizona prefers to “tap the Rockies” and drink western-based Coors Light over Bud, but from Maine all the way through the Northeast and the South, Bud reigns supreme.
Beers based in a certain region have that region’s following.
Local take: For the most part, Arizona takes no part in favoring a regional beer, however from the Valley southward, the taste for Corona and Dos Equis overlap. Not surprisingly, southern California favors Corona, southeastern Texas loves Lone Star and the upper northeast loves Sam Adams.
Illinois and Wisconsin have more bars than grocery stores.
For this one, Zook “mapped the distribution of bars across the country, in terms of the number of bars in Google Maps listings.” He then compared the number of bars with the number of grocery stories in the same area. Result? Illinois and Wisconsin really love their booze.
Only people in the South tweet more about church than beer.
Local take: Both Maricopa and Pinal counties tweet “much more church” than beer, based on the findings. But as for Coconino, Pima and Yuma counties? They tweet “much more beer” than church. It’s also interesting to note that while the South does tweet more about church than beer, only a few states are almost completely red to indicated Church over Beer. Most of the southern states have only a heavy concentration of red in a few parts of the state.
