The Ultimate Brewery Road Trip, Routed Algorithmically

There are thousands of craft breweries in the United States (and the world) that make delicious beer. In 2014, the Brewer’s Association put the United States count at 3,464, with about 1,800 microbreweries and 1,400 brewpubs. BreweryDB currently lists about 4,500.
So there’s a lot of good beer out there — and yet so little time. Unless your job is to drink beer every day, visiting every brewery is probably not a practical goal to strive for. However, visiting the best breweries is something worth thinking about.

Community beer and brewery review site RateBeer puts out a list every year of the top 100 breweries in the world, “according to reviews taken last year and weighted by performance within and outside of style, balanced by indicators of depth.” From this year’s list, 72 of the breweries are based in the United States.

That sounds like a great road trip.
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If we know where we want to go already, the next step is to figure out what route to take. You don’t want to pick breweries willy nilly, unless you’re a fan of driving aimlessly across the country. Randal Olson found a pretty good solution using genetic algorithms and the Google Maps API. He computed an optimal road trip to visit a historical landmark in each state.
Forget that though. I want beer. Tasty beer. I applied Olson’s solution to breweries to get the order in which to visit them in the least miles possible…CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY AT FLOWINGDATA.COM
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