Not to Be Taken Too Seriously: USA's Top Microbrew Cities.

I've said that I won't blog about blogging. However I'm not above the time-honored blogger-hack tradition of picking apart dubious lists. That's what the lists are there for, after all.

So we can thank Travel and Leisure magazine for providing this one on the best American cities for microbrewed beer, and Houston-based Examiner writer Bryan Carey for noticing it. Anyway, it's beer and it's travel and that's what we do here at Thirsty Pilgrim Enterprises.

First, take a breath: There are only 35 cities up for contention, and they're the same 35 cities for every list. So Kansas City is there, and San Juan, Puerto Rico, but St. Louis is not. And a city in the Top 20 only had to beat out 15 others. The odds are that your city was not even up for consideration. OK, ready?

The top city is no surprise: Portland, Oregon. I don't see a category for best breakfast, but surely the deadly combo of Pine State Biscuits (pictured) and Voodoo Donuts would've put Portland over the top there as well. And Denver takes second place, so already this list appears more logical than most.

There's another Portland up high: The one in Maine is ranked 5th, no doubt thanks to Allagash, Shipyard and a smattering of brewpubs. That's the good news. The bad news is that it's also ranked 7th among cities with the "least attractive people." (The "winner" for least attractive, if you care, is Memphis.)

New York City and Washington, D.C., are totally absent, which means they got beat by places like Nashville, Phoenix and Houston. Which is fairly silly, because I think both are among the world's great places to drink craft beer. But there are two groups who vote on these lists: residents and visitors. Not experts. The upshot is that most people who live in or visit those cities don't really know about their craft beer scenes. Or, another possibility: the phrase "microbrewed beer" implies the existence of actual breweries--not a strength of either D.C. or NYC.

Who's missing? And if we compiled a world list, who besides Portland and Denver make the cut from the U.S.?