The Best Beer City in America: Boston

Harpoon Brewery photo via thomasglobal on Flickr

If you like beer—and really, who doesn’t?—you ought to pick up GQ this month, which features a guide to some of America’s best beer towns and bars. The magazine gives New England a little love, calling out Cambridge Brewing Co. as one of the 10 best beer bars in the country (for its “Ancient Viking-style concoctions flavored with heather and bog myrtle, hand-picked from local bogs”), as well as Novare Res up in Portland (“Obscure sour beers, local Maine micros, and obscure Maine sours in a back-alley bierhall”). Great choices.

As for the five best beer cities, some are dead-on (Denver, San Francisco), but others are a little more … odd (Cleveland?). Which is why I’m personally inviting GQ and the story’s writers, Christian DeBenedetti and William Bostwick, out for a weekend of drinking in Boston. Because honestly, we ought to be in the conversation for America’s best beer towns. A sample schedule: A couple of brewery tours (Harpoon, and yes, riding the party trolley from Sam Adams to Doyle’s Cafe), followed by the Belgian Beer Festival or sampling some cask-conditioned ales at Somerville’s NERAX festival (the New England Real Ale eXhibition), and then pub-crawling our way through our other great beer bars, from Lord Hobo and Meadhall to the Publick House and Bukowski’s. Give us a chance, GQ! We’ll impress you.