Philly a better beer-drinking city than Pittsburgh? Sez them.
Thursday, March 06, 2008
By Bob Batz Jr., Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Stacy Innerst, Post-Gazette illustration
Philadelphia says it's a better beer town than Pittsburgh.

Better than any other town.

So says the logo for "Philly Beer Week," an event debuting there
tomorrow that is humbly subtitled, "America's Best Beer-Drinking
City."

I'm not big enough to pick a fight with hardly anyone from
Philadelphia, and certainly not with event co-chair Joe Sixpack.
That's the nom de plume of Don Russell, who certainly is one of
America's best and best-known beer journalists. He's gone from being a
longtime Philadelphia Daily News staffer to working from home
(www.joesixpack.net) and is just releasing his first book, "Joe
Sixpack's Philly Beer Guide: A Reporter's Notes on the Best Beer-
Drinking City in America" (Camino Books, $14.95).

It'd be fun to argue with him about the claim over a pint or three,
but I'd have to concede:

In article <4c55f37b-ae42-4d15-8756-bb87d5d548c8@q78g2000hsh.googlegroups.com>, tomkanpa aol.com> wrote:

tomkanpa aol.com> wrote:

...

Bullcrap. I've been to Philly. It's OK (assuming by
"Philly" you mean "Philadelphia and the whole surrounding
region), but it isn't a patch on Portland OR for being
a good beer-drinking city. IMnsHO.

(Where's Bruels when you need him?)

GregS (who obviouly never heard of trimming quoted text):

...

A simple number of bars or bars per capita is completely
insufficient to assess quality of beer-drinking in any city.
You could have a bar per capita someplace like (purely for
the sake of argument) Pittsburgh, but if all they were
pouring was Iron City it'd be a crap place for beer.
--

In article badger.ncsa.uiuc.edu>, plutchak AT see.headers (Joel) wrote:

GregS zekfrivolous.com> wrote:

So you can define "better" in any way you want, which
makes the whole issue completely irrelevant. One could
also define any word any way one desires, which would
make communication completely random or irrelevant.
Here in the rec.food.drink.beer newsgroup I like to
think we start from a point somewhat beyond complete
arbitrariness. So we take the word "better" and assume
it has a quality implications. And since taste is
largely (not completely) a personal matter, I submit
the bottom line for deciding whether any given location
is a "better" beer destination rests upon broadness of
choice.
Or you can be a Beer Barney.

In article badger.ncsa.uiuc.edu>, plutchak AT see.headers (Joel) wrote:

...

Joel wrote:

You're new here, aren't you?

And to some us of, a good part of the equation of the quality of a city
for beer drinking has nothing to do with beer. It has to do just as much
with things like the atmosphere of the bars, the ability to move from
bar-to-bar quickly and efficiently, the ability to find decent beer even
when not heading out specifically to good-beer bars, etc.