Legal Barriers

One possible explanation for at least some of the variation between areas may come from the fact that laws on beer manufacturing vary heavily between areas. This means that certain areas could have a conducive environment for starting a brewery, and indeed some breweries may open in these areas. However, they may ultimately have a great deal of trouble growing under the burden of various state and local ordinances and may ultimately close. This has some weight to it at least as far as that there are still dry counties in many parts of the Midwest and Southeast, where beer would obviously not be brewed. While the dry counties example may not be 100% relevant since many of those counties also do not have the population to sustain many breweries, other legal barriers, such as franchise and licensing laws, could be relevant. This is something that could lead to some interesting future research, but efforts would have to be made to control for pre-existing cultural views on alcohol. While cultural views would serve to shape legislation, they would also affect consumption patterns even in the absence of legal barriers.