Since it’s a statistics kind of week, I thought I’d share this other list recently released by the Brewers Association. I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s Breweries Per Capita, essentially the number of breweries in each state, divided by the population. Since it makes no difference what size the brewery is, a single brewpub producing 10,000 barrels a year is counted the same as one making 10,000,000 barrels. Still, it’s interesting to look at it this way, too, even though it’s doesn’t mean that much. I doubt there will be dancing in the streets of towns throughout Vermont over this news.

California, with more than twice the breweries of the next nearest state, is ranked only 21st. Colorado, who recently overtook California for total barrels brewed by a single state, is ranked 5th.

 
Breweries Per Capita

 
The first figure is the number of breweries and the last is the per brewery population based on the US Census Bureau estimates.

1. 19 Vermont 32,698
2. 27 Montana 35,831
3. 93 Oregon 40,753
4. 31 Maine 42,466
5. 103 Colorado 47,956
6. 14 Alaska 49,021
7. 10 Wyoming 53,267
8. 100 Washington 65,492
9. 7 Delaware 84,548
10. 66 Wisconsin 85,272
11. 15 New Hampshire 87,721
12. 16 Idaho 95,239
13. 15 Nebraska 118,895
14. 16 New Mexico 124,022
15. 70 Michigan 142,906
16. 5 South Dakota 160,839
17. 8 Hawaii 161,025
18. 16 Nevada 162,510
19. 17 Kansas 164,831
20. 75 Pennsylvania 165,977
21. 221 California 166,320
22. 18 Iowa 166,809
23. 38 Massachusetts 170,999
24. 14 Utah 195,459
25. 29 Missouri 203,848
26. 5 Rhode Island 210,158
27. 16 Connecticut 218,828
28. 28 Indiana 227,743
29. 22 Minnesota 237,291
30. 32 Virginia 242,784
31. 26 Arizona 250,007
32. 21 Maryland 268,267
33. 42 Ohio 273,474
34. 33 North Carolina 279,467
35. 3 DC 291,031
36. 6 West Virginia 302,411
37. 41 Illinois 314,672
38. 14 South Carolina 319,986
39. 56 New York 348,041
40. 14 Tennessee 443,921
41. 39 Florida 469,957
42. 18 New Jersey 482,370
43. 7 Oklahoma 520,337
44. 16 Georgia 605,359
45. 7 Kentucky 609,892
46. 1 North Dakota 641,481
47. 36 Texas 675,749
48. 4 Arkansas 713,848
49. 5 Alabama 932,380
50. 4 Louisiana 1,102,699
51. 1 Mississippi 2,938,618

It looks like Newark’s finest, Rolling Rock, may be another casualty of the A-B InBev merger of last year. Ironically, A-B bought Rolling Rock from InBev for $82 million in 2006 and then bought it back as part of the 52 billion they paid for Anheuser-Busch.

It’s been brewing for a few weeks. I’ve been having conversations, discussing ideas and thinking about the future. And now it’s arrived … or almost. Beginning on Wednesday, April 15, I’ll be taking over Bill Brand’s old column and the Bottoms Up Blog. I’ll be writing a column for the Oakland Tribune newspaper which will appear every other Wednesday, and hopefully will get picked up by a least some of the news group’s 60 other papers. The first one will appear next Wednesday, and is more of an introduction for newspaper readers of who I am, information you no doubt already possess. After that, the columns will be all about the beer.

I’ll be taking a different approach to the Bottom’s Up Blog, inviting other Bay Area Beer Bloggers and even the occasional brewer to contribute to it in an effort to make it a true beer community blog. And in order to impose some order out of the chaos that news is, I’ll be running some regular items on the same day of the week and four monthly features, as well, though three of those will be guest-written. I’m still not sure about Bill’s weekly e-mail pdf that he sent every Wednesday. We’re still trying to figure out where that list is. If there’s enough interest, we may have to rebuild it from scratch.

The Brookston Beer Bulletin will remain largely unchanged, I’ll keep writing it as before. There shouldn’t be too much overlap. The Bottom’s Up Blog will be all consumer-oriented and the Bulletin will remain beer industry focused. On Bottoms Up, I’ll only opine about the beer, on the Bulletin I’ll continue to rant about everything else. There’s still a few more things to do to get ready for the launch. I’m having new head shots taken today and I still have to write a short biography for the website.

I’m very pleased that Bill’s column will continue — though under a new name — it’s an important legacy that at least some newspapers are willing to embrace craft and better imported beer. But I confess I’m a little nervous at the prospect of filling Bill’s shoes. He meant a lot to a great many people — myself included — and despite the fact that I’ve been writing about beer for almost twenty years and been fairly involved in the Bay Area scene for quite some time, I’ll still be the new kid for many mainstream newspaper readers. But, as the saying goes, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” It was also an opportunity to reach a much wider audience, and one I didn’t feel I could pass up. So I’m as excited as I am nervous, a curious mix of butterflies clenching in my stomach but filled with possibilities, like the feeling you get just before you go on stage. But, hopefully, I’m ready for my close up. I hope you’ll read me there, as well as here.

In a recent Chow article online, Lessley Anderson gives a fairly decent account of Brettanomyces beers. I would have preferred a different title than Your Beer Smells Like Goat, but I guess it does grab your attention. Apart from too many references to stinky aromas, it’s a good overview and includes a nice list of examples. Still, if you’re not too familiar with beers made with wild yeast, it’s a good introduction; worth a read.

Yesterday, Barack Obama picked Charles Hurley to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). His resume looks impressive. He was a VP “of the Transportation Safety Group for the National Safety Council and the executive director of the Council’s Air Bag and Seat Belt Safety Campaign.” All well and good.

What’s not so good is that since 2005, Hurley has also been at the helm of one of the country’s most influential and destructive neo-prohibitionist groups, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. And long before that, he was an active supporter of MADD. From the 2005 press release announcing Hurley as MADD’s new CEO:

A longtime friend and supporter of MADD, Hurley has played an important role in the organization’s history. He attended MADD’s first national press conference in October 1980 in Washington, D.C., and helped MADD win support for the Presidential Commission on Drunk Driving. He also worked for and strongly supported MADD’s efforts to pass the National 21 Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984. From 1993 to 1998, Hurley served on the MADD National Board of Directors.

News reports are focusing on Hurley’s record of working on safety issues, and that’s certainly a good thing. But what troubles me is that MADD may have been about keeping drunk drivers off the road when it began, but at least since founder Candy Lightner left in 1985 (five years after its founding) it’s grown increasingly into a neo-prohibitionst group that’s become less and less about drunk driving and more about removing all alcohol from society. And obviously that includes the last four years that Hurley was running the propaganda organization. The idea of MADD setting government policy from within the NHTSA is frightening in the extreme. When it comes to the safety issues that’s all well and good but it seems all too easy to imagine the propaganda, exaggerations and misinformation that MADD has been spewing for years would be used to create policy without oversight, without listening to dissenting voices, and without regard to reality, truth or — probably — our civil rights. This could be very, very bad. Putting anyone with such an extreme agenda into a position of power with the ability to make policy seems like an incredibly dangerous thing to do, but especially so when he’s an insider to the neo-prohibitionist movement. That’s driving me to drink.