President of Beers: #20

We're drinking the flagship craft beer from every state in the Union, counting down from 50-1, to find which is home to the President of Beers.

#20 SweetWater 420 Extra Pale Ale: SweetWater Brewing Company, Atlanta, Georgia

State: The very contradictory state of Georgia, home to OutKast, the Indigo Girls, Chick-fil-A, Michael Stipe, Tyler Perry, the Duke boys, and a bunch of redneck motherfuckers.

Brewery: SweetWater Brewing, the largest in the state and one of the 25 largest in the country. It's in Atlanta, a tree-canopied city said to be "too busy to hate."

Beer: SweetWater 420 Extra Pale Ale, first brewed in 1997. Several of our tasters thought it was a hoppy Pilsner, with the others marking it âIPA?â

Difficulty of obtaining in Oregon: Moderate. It's available all over the South.

Rating: 65.5

The south is not big on craft beer, but in a city as big as Atlanta, the de facto capital of its region, you find a little bit of everything.

SweetWater—it actually sells more beer than Rogue—rules the roost in those parts. They even have an outpost in the ATL airport. In only 15 years, this stuff has taken over the South. The beer we tried, a pale ale named for a slang term for marijuana, probably wouldn't find its way onto many taps here, but it's a revelation to its own people.

Visiting the brewery itself sounds.... awful. From what I can surmise from Yelp reviews, it seems they only open the place up on weekends for something loosely resembling a beer festival with tickets and long lines to pound something called Donkey Punch which may or may not be blue.

From a pair of four-star Yelp reviews:

To me, this all sounds unimaginably awful. Like the time I went to a NASCAR race. But, hey, let's just be happy Atlanta has a popular craft brewery. Hopefully it will somehow lead to the development of a sophisticated and vital beer culture in the state of Georgia.

Stand back and give it a double-wide berth.

Click on a state to read more President of Beers posts:

WWeek 2015