Ah, craft beer, the poor man’s drink Olympics. With over 4,500 craft breweries scattered around the country—and that’s just the ones with wholesale accounts—it’s hard to imagine why USA Today’s blog For the Win said they were “attempting to determine which of the [craft] breweries in America is the greatest.” By user voting, no less. Just this morning, they posted a new bracket showing they’d narrowed it down to sixteen breweries. Hey, feel free to cast your vote, but we’ve had enough of the beeriarchy. In fact, we much prefer this absurd beer bracket by Jon Bois and Spencer Hall over at SB Nation, which pits beers like “Reddist Sexist Upvote Dog Porter” against “Something about a Fucking Ship.”
Contenders’ names in the SB tourney are a sharp nod to the absurd titling of craft brews. With beers like Arrogant Bastard and Sexy Flanders out there, it’s not a far jump to Bois and Hall’s “Apollo Flirt-Teen Sex Courage Cider,” or “Dad’s Silent Regret Porter.” There’s no voting in this bracket, and no winner either. Instead, the center of the image reads, “There will be no second round because every beer is a winner because every beer is pretty good but if there were it would probably be Indianapolis.” We’re not too sure about that first part (otherwise why would they have a contender called “Water: A Light Ale”), but it is true that pitting craft breweries against one another is like pitting varieties of pasta against each other. In other words, it’s mostly just a matter taste.
Maybe if it For the Win’s bracket were beer to beer, instead of brewery to brewery, there’d be something to talk about there. But since it’s not, we’re just gonna stick with this one. So have a laugh, and text us when you get off work—we’ll all meet up for happy hour pints of Agoraphobia GoToMeeting Stout.