This Treasure Valley City Is A Better Beer Town Than Boise

Boise gets a lot of credit for being a great beer town. Why shouldn't it? Last year, move.org named Boise the number twelve best city for beer lovers in the entire country. That ranked the City of Trees ahead of places you would expect to see ranked in the top 10 like Milwaukee, Austin, Nashville, and Kansas City.

Since that survey, Boise has added three more breweries. That makes one brewery for every 11,750 residents. We're talking high-quality breweries too. I'd put some of our best against the best in Portland, Denver, or St. Louis, the cities that rank ahead of Boise in all of the surveys on the topic.

One Idaho city seems to never quite get the same credibility as Boise. Maybe because of its proximity to the Idaho capitol, it gets lumped in as part of the Treasure Valley like Nampa, Meridian, and Caldwell. Because if it's proximity, it's almost punished and doesn't get counted the same way. "Oh, that's just a suburb of Boise. It doesn't count." I think it's time we reconsider Garden City as a beer town on its own.

The case for Garden City has to start with the number of breweries in such a small area. The 4.2 miles that make up the city includes six breweries. That means that there is one brewery for every 2,044 residents! Sure, it's a small sample size, but that puts Garden City far beyond the nearly 13 breweries per capita that the Nation's leader Portland, Oregon, boasts.

The Garden City breweries are mostly younger than their Boise counterparts. That means that they will continue to grow and get better. Say what you want about Garden City, but no one can knock it as a beer town, perhaps even better than its big brother.