Massachusetts has a long pastime with alcohol. The history of beer and bars is intertwined in Massachusetts state history so much so that the first bar in the country opened in Boston on March 4, 1634.

While the business of booze has certainly changed since then, Massachusetts is still home to an abundance of microbreweries, an industry that has skyrocketed in popularity throughout the country over the past two decades.

Once thought of as an industry created exclusively by beer geeks for a niche clientele of homebrewers, craft beer consumption has become one of the fastest-growing parts of alcoholic beverage sales in the United States.

Since 2005, revenue from microbreweries has grown by more than 300%. Over the past 20 years, thousands of new, independent breweries and brewpubs have opened and employment in the industry has more than tripled.

While the popularity of these craft breweries has grown nationwide, specific pockets of the country have become hot spots for beer enthusiasts and New England is certainly one of those.

According to mass.gov, Massachusetts is home to over 130 microbreweries spreading from Cape Cod to the Berkshire Mountains. That's a lot of completion, but two of the most popular breweries in the state stand out from the pack and we're recently ranked as the number one and number 3 breweries in not just Massachusetts, but the entire country.

Two Massachusetts Breweries Named Number One and Number Three in the United States.

According to Untappd, the premiere geosocial beer nerd network, Treehouse Brewing Company out of Charlton, MA, was ranked as the best brewery in the United States, followed closely by another popular Massachusetts brewery, Trillium Brewing Company, based out of Canton, MA, coming in at number 3.

 

The Untappd app, where users can track and rate, bars, breweries, and individual beers themselves, based the rankings on their weighted average formula, which effectively rates all breweries against each other and gives weight to their beers with higher rating count. A brewery must have at least 1,000 ratings and at least 5 beers in their portfolio to qualify for this list.

 

According to the Boston Globe, last year Treehouse brewed over 44,000 barrels of beer with an estimated revenue of $54 million according to Rocket Research. To put that in perspective in 2015, Treehouse produced just 2,350 barrels, showing its exponential growth.

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Gallery Credit: Sarah Jones

 

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