Is Milwaukee America's Best Beer City? Where It Lands on 14 Lists

The Milwaukee Brewers swept the Los Angeles Dodgers in the National League Championship Series and reached their first World Series since 1982, against the Tampa Bay Rays, which opened on October 23 at American Family Field.¹ Neither franchise has won a championship.²

The city has carried its name further than most places its size. A lager made Milwaukee famous before a ballpark did, a motorcycle company grew up in a backyard shed there, and a 1970s sitcom set a whole fictional America on its streets. These rankings put the city, and the things named after it, next to Portland, Nashville, Boston, Fargo and a few dozen others.

Milwaukee's reputation was built by what left town: a lager, a motorcycle, a sitcom. These rankings ask how much of it the city still owns.

Beer cities: Milwaukee vs Portland, Oregon

This ranking asks which American city is the best to drink in. Milwaukee is on it because the industry was built there. Frederick Miller leased the Plank Road Brewery outside town in 1855 and later bought it, and by his death in 1888 its output had grown from about 300 barrels a year to 80,000.³

Pabst, Schlitz and Blatz were the other Milwaukee names that went national, which is how a city of German brewers ended up with a baseball team named after the trade.

Portland, Oregon has the opposing case: a craft scene built long after the great lager brands stopped being local news. Asheville, Denver and Bend make the same claim. Milwaukee's reply is that it did the original version.

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Milwaukee vs Minneapolis: the Midwest city worth the trip

Fifteen Midwest cities compete on this ranking, from Chicago, about 90 miles down the lake shore, to Omaha, Madison and Ann Arbor. Milwaukee enters with a short, specific pitch: an art museum, a festival ground, a river walk and a ballpark, all at the scale of a long weekend.

Minneapolis has the Walker Art Center, a Mississippi riverfront and a city laid out around its lakes. Chicago is the obvious heavyweight, and Madison, Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids are the college and craft-beer towns.

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Milwaukee vs Pittsburgh: the most underrated cities in America

Underrated is a claim about reputation, and Milwaukee's reputation is thin: beer, bratwurst and cold. Pittsburgh made the same trade earlier, swapping steel for museums, universities and bridges.

Kansas City, Cincinnati, Louisville, Providence and Tulsa share the list, with Spokane, Savannah, Richmond and Chattanooga filling out the 20. They share a gap between what a visitor expects and what a weekend delivers.

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Summerfest and the Nashville question: where live music lives

Nashville, Austin, New Orleans and Memphis answer this question for most people. Milwaukee is on the ranking because of one site: Summerfest has run on the lakefront at Henry Maier Festival Park since 1968, spread over nine days and three weekends, and drew 555,925 people in 2024.⁴

The Pabst Theater and a year-round club circuit sit behind it.

Nashville's counter is density. Its music is the industry itself, not an annual event, and no festival ground is needed to prove it.

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Milwaukee vs St. Louis: the baseball city that lost to the other

The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Brewers in the seven-game 1982 World Series, so this pairing carries history before it carries an argument.²

St. Louis built its claim on Cardinals titles and Busch Stadium crowds. Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco stand beside it on a list of 18.

Milwaukee has lost baseball once already. The Braves arrived from Boston in 1953, won the 1957 World Series and left for Atlanta in 1966. The Brewers have kept the crowds without a championship, and that loyalty is the case.

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American Family Field vs Wrigley Field: the roof against the ivy

American Family Field opened on April 6, 2001, as Miller Park and took its current name in 2021. Its fan-shaped retractable roof is the signature, and this year's World Series is the first ever played there.⁵

Wrigley Field has hosted baseball since 1914 and put ivy on its outfield walls. It is the park the others are measured against, with Fenway, Oracle Park, PNC Park and Camden Yards close behind.

The old name, Miller Park, came from a naming-rights deal with Miller Brewing Company, and the Milwaukee park is still known for its tailgating.

youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-mlb-ballpark

Milwaukee vs Boston: the basketball city with one big summer

On July 20, 2021, the Milwaukee Bucks beat the Phoenix Suns 105 to 98 in Game 6 of the NBA Finals after losing the first two games. Giannis Antetokounmpo scored 50 points in the clincher, and the title was the franchise's second and its first in half a century.⁶

Boston answers with the Celtics and the Beanpot schools. Storrs, Lawrence and Chapel Hill are on it too, towns where the college program is the main team.

youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-basketball-city-in-america

Milwaukee Bucks vs Los Angeles Lakers: the franchise that traded Kareem

The Bucks won their first championship in 1971 with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. They traded him to the Los Angeles Lakers in 1975, and he won five more titles there.

Milwaukee waited until 2021 for its second. The Lakers spent those years collecting titles, which is the comparison this ranking invites.

Twenty franchises are on the list. The list also holds the Celtics, Bulls, Warriors and Spurs, and the Bucks' case is one player's peak, twice.

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Fiserv Forum vs Madison Square Garden: an arena built around a plaza

Fiserv Forum opened on August 26, 2018, seats 17,385 for basketball and hosted Game 6 of the 2021 Finals.⁷ The Killers played the first concert there, with Violent Femmes, on September 4, 2018.

Its public space is the Deer District plaza outside, where playoff nights turn into street parties.

Madison Square Garden has been the league's most famous address for decades, and Milwaukee's building has been open since 2018.

youpick.best/ranking/which-nba-arena-is-the-best-place-to-watch-a-game

Summerfest vs Glastonbury: the festival Guinness certified

Guinness World Records certified Summerfest in 1999 as the world's largest music festival, a title the festival still uses.⁴

Glastonbury, on a farm in Somerset, sets the standard for what a festival means to its crowd. Coachella, Tomorrowland, Oktoberfest and Rio Carnival keep the company varied, and so do Kumbh Mela and Holi.

Size and reputation are different measures, and a list this broad forces the voter to pick one.

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Harley-Davidson Museum vs Bradford Beach: the Milwaukee list itself

This is the one ranking about Milwaukee itself: which attraction in the city is best, from a museum to a beach. William Harley and Arthur Davidson started their motorcycle company in Milwaukee in 1903, which is why the Harley-Davidson Museum is a stop on any visit.⁸

Bradford Beach is the counter-argument, a city beach on Lake Michigan that surprises people who assumed the Midwest had none. The Milwaukee Art Museum, Summerfest, the Historic Third Ward, Lakefront Brewery, the Pabst Mansion and the Mitchell Park Domes all share the list.

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Milwaukee Art Museum vs the Guggenheim: the building with wings

The Milwaukee Art Museum's Quadracci Pavilion was completed in 2001 and was Santiago Calatrava's first project in the United States. Its movable sunscreen spans 217 feet and is made of 72 steel fins, and it takes 3.5 minutes to open or close.⁹

Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim opened in 1959, a white spiral on Fifth Avenue that the other buildings on the list are still measured against. The list also holds the Getty Center, the Kimbell and the Denver Art Museum, and it judges the building, not the collection inside.

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Happy Days vs The Mary Tyler Moore Show: Milwaukee on 1970s television

Happy Days is set in Milwaukee, and so is its spin-off Laverne & Shirley, whose heroines bottled beer at the fictional Shotz Brewery from 1976 to 1983. Laverne & Shirley was filmed in California.¹⁰

The Mary Tyler Moore Show put its newsroom in Minneapolis, and WKRP in Cincinnati did the same for that city. On this list of 22 sitcoms, Milwaukee is the setting for a sitcom, not the subject of one.

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Milwaukee vs Fargo: the harshest winter in America

Milwaukee's normal snowfall for 1991 to 2020 is 48.7 inches, and its record season is 109.8 inches, set in 1885 and 1886.¹¹

Fargo has the open prairie and nothing between the city and the wind. Minneapolis, Duluth, Buffalo, Anchorage and Green Bay are the other cold-weather contenders, and Chicago is on the same lake. The rest of the article asks what Milwaukee is good at; this list asks what it puts up with.

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Milwaukee: the name travels, the city stays

Most of what carries Milwaukee's name arrived through a brewery, a team or a broadcaster, and the lists keep finding the city one step behind its own exports. Nothing here settles that, and the Brewers' series gives the question a week of attention it rarely gets. The pairwise method behind these rankings works on any two cities.

If Madison or Green Bay belongs beside Milwaukee, a head-to-head ranking of the two is the quickest way to find out.

More rankings, more angles

• Chicago Is on Every List. Never in the Same Place — the lake city 90 miles south, with its own winter
• Is Harley-Davidson the Best Motorcycle Brand? 13 Lists — the Milwaukee shed brand on 13 lists
• Best Alcoholic Drink? Where Beer Lands on 16 Lists — the drink Milwaukee built, across 16 lists