Oshkosh and the Beer Belly of Wisconsin

Last month the blog Floating Sheep ran a post entitled The Beer Belly of America which mapped the dense concentration of bars in the upper Midwest of the United States. Not surprisingly, Wisconsin was prominently featured.

We thought it might be fun to break this down even further and look at the clustering of bars within Wisconsin and see where Oshkosh stands in the mix.

Taking the ten largest cities in Wisconsin and determining the number of bars each city has per 10,000 people, here’s what we’ve come up with. Note, the cities are listed in order of total population.

As you can see, Oshkosh comes in second with 12.09 bars for every 10,000 people. To make this all somewhat easier to digest, the actual people to bar ratio would be as follows.

1) Green Bay: 687 people for every bar.
2) Oshkosh:  827 people for every bar.
3) Racine: 1015 people for every bar.
4) Milwaukee: 1048 people for every bar.
5) Kenosha: 1065 people for every bar.
6) Appleton: 1116 people for every bar.
7) Eau Claire: 1212 people for every bar.
8) Madison: 1528 people for every bar.
9) Janesville: 1563 people for every bar.
10) Waukesha: 2125 people for every bar.

However, you have to dig a little deeper to find the true Bar-King of Wisconsin. And that would be La Crosse, the twelfth largest city in the state. La Crosse supports a whopping 17.09 bars for every 10,000 people or 585 people for every bar in town. Oshkosh, we’ve got some catching up to do!