American Beer Day is a time for beer drinkers to unite and celebrate the art of drinking beer. In observance, national real estate brokerage Redfin is helping beer fanatics discover the cities with potential for the most epic pub crawls of all time. After all, we all need a break from this presidential election and it sounds like a nice escape to visit local businesses, share a drink with your neighbors and enjoy city life.
We took Walk Score data and found the optimal route for hitting the most bars in succession in every city in America. We made sure bars were no farther than 300 meters apart (or three football fields, fellow Americans) and mapped out a walking path through the city for people to follow. The results are astonishing.
New York City comes in first place, with a bar crawl that hits more than 419 bars and spans 41.2 miles — this is the Pacific Crest Trail of pub crawls, people! It would take all summer to responsibly complete. Other cities offering unique adventures include a pub crawl hitting 100 bars and spanning 5.7 miles in downtown New Orleans, a 93-bar and 9-mile crawl through San Francisco and a 64-pub and 5.9-mile trek through downtown Chicago.
As our legal team points out, these pub crawls should probably not be attempted in a day or even a single month in some cases. The goal here is inspiration to see the city and find some new favorite watering holes, not to hit 49 pubs on a Saturday!
So safe travels, and here are the 10 most epic pub crawls in the United States:
1. New York, NY
Walk Score: 87.6
2. New Orleans, LA
Walk Score: 57
3. San Francisco, CA
Walk Score: 86
4. Chicago, IL
Walk Score: 78
5. Austin, TX
Walk Score: 39
6. Baltimore, MD
Walk Score: 69
7. Orlando, FL
Walk Score: 41
8. Detroit, MI
Walk Score: 55
9. El Paso, TX
Walk Score: 40
10. Portland, OR
Walk Score: 64
Method and Data
TLDR: We built a robot, fed it a database of pubs and then asked it to find the best pub crawls.
Here’s how Redfin found the top 10 pub crawls in America.
First, Walk Score provided the location of all of the pubs in the U.S.
Then we made clusters of nearby pubs, using a 300-meter buffer. Although some people will walk 3 miles for another beer, others won’t even leave the bar at one pub to get another beer at the place next door. Three hundred meters, or three football fields, was a comfortable middle ground.
Because finding the optimal pub crawl is, in nerd-speak, a “NP-hard” problem that gets much more difficult every time another pub is added to the equation, breaking the database into smaller chunks of pub clusters helped turn this into a bunch of smaller, solvable problems. For each pub cluster, we computed the shortest pub crawl that passed through each pub in a cluster only once. Then we counted the number of pubs and the distance of each crawl.
United States
Canada