Top 20 cities for beer drinkers? Oregon has three, study finds

Three Oregon cities rank in the Top 20 nationally as the best spots to be a beer drinker, a study released Wednesday says, but Portland fell from No. 1 in 2018 to No. 3 this year.

Bend is the seventh-best city in the U.S. for beer drinking, and Eugene is 20th, according to a study by the financial technology company SmartAsset. Bend joined Portland in repeating its Top 10 finish but dropped two spots from its fifth-place ranking last year.

SmartAsset says it analyzed 300 cities and based findings on criteria such as the number of breweries, concentration of bars and price of a domestic pint.

The top city for beer drinkers was Cincinnati, which had placed fourth in the 2018 study, and St. Louis was second. The Top 10 included four Western and four Midwestern cities, with only Oregon and Ohio landing two cities in the Top 10.

All three Oregon cities were among the top half of cities in four of five criteria studied: number of breweries, density of breweries, average number of beers per brewery and the density of bars. In the fifth criteria, the average cost of a pint, Bend and Eugene matched the national average of $4.50, but Portland exceeded it at $5.

The three cities also landed in the Top 40 for both number of breweries and breweries per 100,000 residents.

SmartAsset said more than $119.3 billion in beer and malt-based beverages is sold in the U.S. annually, with 26.5 gallons of beer and cider consumed per adult in 2018. It also cited National Beer Wholesalers Association findings that show about 82 percent of all beer in the U.S. was domestically produced in 2018.