Missouri’s love for alcohol isn’t that big of a secret. There’s the Missouri Rhineland and its great wine production, Anhe-Busch’s beer production in St. Louis, and the fact prohibition didn’t really seem to slow down Kansas City bars.
Throw in the fact Missouri bourbon made from official Missouri products has been an official whiskey style since Jan. 1, 2020, and there’s no doubt Missourians love drinking.
BetMissouri.com — which provides the best coverage of Missouri sportsbooks — utilized Google Trends and Statista to develop the ranking of the states that love bourbon the most.
We used Google Trends to get the states with the most bourbon searches since 2021. Statista.com was also used to see per capita consumption of straight bourbon whiskey per state since 2021. Once that information was compiled, a point system was created giving up to 50 points for search rank and up to 50 for per capita consumption for each state.
That put Missouri at No. 2 behind only Kentucky, the home of bourbon, based on the combined ranking of consumption and searches since 2021.
Bourbon Lovers Per State
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Missouri Building a Bourbon Brand
According to the Google Trends data, the Joplin, Mo.-Pittsburg, Kansas, metro area does the most searching for bourbon in Missouri, followed by St. Louis and the Columbia-Jefferson City area. The search number reached its highest points around Christmas in each of the past two years, so it looks like Missourians are looking for that perfect holiday cocktail (or gift), and bourbon is on the menu.
Missouri has been building its bourbon brand in earnest since Gov. Mike Parson signed HB 266 on July 11, 2019, setting the standards for any Missouri bourbon to meet regarding how it’s mashed, fermented, distilled, aged in oak barrels, made in the state and then bottled in the state, according to whiskeyadvocate.com.
That gave the Missouri Craft Distillers Guild all of the power it needed to start putting Missouri bourbon on the map across the country and putting it on the same playing field as official bourbons in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Missouri Straight Bourbon Whiskey — Single Barrel out of St. Louis and Rubenesque out of Florence - are two of the state’s top bourbon brands, according to Social Scene, while Tripadvisor ranks Tom’s Town Distilling Co. in downtown Kansas City as the state’s best distillery attraction.
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Author
Douglas Pils has been a sports journalist for 30 years in Texas, Arkansas and New York having worked for the San Antonio Express-News, the Associated Press, The Dallas Morning News and Newsday. He most recently ran the Student Media Department at Texas A&M for eight years.
