Morgantown WV makes top beer city list

For the past decade, Morgantown has scored well on many national quality of life rankings for small cities. Now, it’s also ranked as one of the best cities in the country for beer.

According to Livability.com, a website which ranks cities on livability, Morgantown ranks 71st in the nation as a great place to live and drink beer. The firm recently released a report titled 99 Beers in 99 Cities.

To make its list, Livability searched for cities that fit three criteria:

• good places to live,
• consumers of craft beer, and
• producers of the best beer around.

They used their own LivScore methodology to determine “good places to live.” They relied on Ersi, a large GIS data firm, to provide the consumer market data that helped Livability narrow down cities that “spend much on craft beer, spend less on domestic macro beers, and overall support dining and drinking both in the home and out on the town.”

For the best beer, they used the scores at RateBeer.com to select a highly-rated beer to represent the town. An additional requirement was that a town had to have at least two breweries.

Livability finds Morgantown has lots to offer

In its description of Morgantown, the website talks about WVU, the interesting neighborhoods (sorry they couldn’t experience the old days of Sunnyside block parties), theaters, parks, and a “hearty” nightlife scene.

For beer drinking, Livability mentions both Mountain State Brewing and Morgantown Brewing. Don’t know how they missed Chestnut Brew Works. For the best beer, they selected Coal City Stout.

For those of us who went to school there, I don’t think there was ever a doubt that Morgantown was a good town for beer drinking. It’s nice, however, to see its beer scene get some national recognition beyond the annual home of the best party school.

To see the full list of cities, click here.