Magic Hat #9 Lands at #13 on Portland Paper's Beer List

Our alt-weekly comrades at Portland, Ore.’s Willamette Week got into the election-season spirit by rounding up the “flagship” craft beer from each state and ranking each to determine the “President of Beers.” (A blind taste test of 50 beers? Tough gig, eh?) The project began with this rousing mission statement:

Beer is liquid culture, and America’s tapestry of wildly varied laws creates very different visions of what’s popular or possible.

…beer birthed civilization. If, as many anthropologists believe, early human clans settled into cities to ferment grains, isn’t the beer … a fair benchmark of its peoples’ progress? Why even bother with civilization—entering a social contract, punching ballots and paying taxes—if we can’t get better beer out of it?

Naturally, this Vermont beer geek paid close attention to the list — we’ve still got the most breweries of any state per capita, after all. Willamette Week‘s team picked Magic Hat #9 to represent our fair state, and it came in 13th on the list. Not a bad showing, but not great, either.