Finding myself with several days off of work and a nasty cold, I decided to diddle around with some python, census data, and brewery listings. Ultimately, I thought it would be cool to make some chloropleth maps of some different states to compare stuff like # of breweries per capita per county or zip code that potential brewery startups could leverage when looking for a final location. I'm not there yet, but made some progress. As a beginning, I calculated the # of breweries per capita for every town/city in Texas.
Populations are from the US Census 2012 estimates (used 2012 to follow along with a tutorial I found for working with Census data). Finding a good listing of breweries in Texas was difficult. First, I signed up at brewerydb.com and used their API, but spot checking found too many out-of-date entries. Next I tried the TABC public info records, but due to the mess of different licence types available in Texas I finally gave up trying to parse meaningful data. Where I finally had some luck was scraping information from the Brewer's Association as their listings look reasonably up to date. From there, I considered the categories "Micro", "Regional", and "Brewpub". In some states this would distort the data somewhat (example: Deschutes has 3 entries in Oregon for a regional brewery and 2 brewpubs), but it seems okay for Texas from what I can tell.
Some data points I found interesting...
Top # of breweries per 100k people, filtered for towns with population of at least 10k:
Boerne - 35
Fredericksburg - 19
Richmond - 17
Dickinson - 16
Webster - 9
If I limit to places that actually have at least 100k people, results per 100k people are:
Austin - 3
Round Rock - 2
Abilene - 2
Denton - 2
McKinney - 2
Corpus Christi - 1
(for reference Dallas = 0.967, Houston = 0.787, conclusion Dallas > Houston)
Top 10 underserved cities (2012 estimated population with no listings found):
Laredo (244731)
Grand Prarie (181824)
Brownsville (180097)
Mesquite (143195)
McAllen (134719)
killeen (134654)
Frisco (128176)
Carrollton (125409)
Midland (119385)
Odessa (106102)
Conclusion: If you want to open a microbrewery or brewpub in Texas with limited local competition look in affluent DFW suburbs, the Valley, or Midland/Odessa.
The brewery association also has listings for "Planning" breweries that haven't opened yet. I omitted these from the above numbers as it seems the standards to get one of these listings is pretty low and I don't think the list is maintained nearly as well (my guess is that a majority of these never pan out). If I included "Planning" in my filter, I got over 400 results for Texas. Without, it was less than 200. I also excluded "Large" breweries, but there were only a few listings and it wouldn't have really skewed the numbers much.