American Beer Preferences Mapped, According to Twitter

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Photo credit: Floating Sheep (click here for larger image)

Florida is Yuengling country, but Corona rules the roost in Southern California. Mid-Atlantic-ers prefer a cold National Bohemian, whereas Coors completely dominates Colorado.

This all according to data crunched and released last week by the blog Floating Sheep, which is helmed by a group of academics hailing from universities including the University of Kentucky and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

Using a database containing about a million geotagged tweets unleashed between June 2012 and May 2013—all containing the key words “wine,” “beer,” or the names of certain light, inexpensive, or regional beers such as Grain Belt, Goose Island, and Olympia—Floating Sheep deduced where those beers were most popular.

Though some brews are preferred in and around the places they were first made, of course (Sam Adams is beloved in its native New England and Lone Star in its home state of Texas), researchers discovered that other regional brews have proven more successful in branching out.

"[Beers] like Hudepohl and Goose Island are interesting in that they stretch out from their places of origin—Cincinnati and Chicago, respectively—to encompass a much broader region where there tend to be fewer regionally-specific competitors, at least historically," reads a Floating Sheep blog post.

The boozyfindings will have an entire chapter devoted to them in an upcoming book from science publisher Springer called “The Geography of Beer,” which ain’t too shabby for research gleaned from the Twitters.

Now, who’s up for a cold one?