Does Virginia really have the fewest bars per capita in the country?

A well-circulated article and map asserted that North Dakota has the most bars per person.  This smells fishy to me - and not just because the producers of this map are from North Dakota.  Virginia came in dead last - with only one bar to every 64,773 residents.  In other words, Virginia must have only 125 bars.  Anyone who lives in Charlottesville knows this can't possibly be true - unless all 125 of those bars are located right here.

I don't know where they got their data, but my guess is that the discrepancy has something to do with the fact that Virginia doesn't actually have "bars" as a legal category of establishment.  Instead, most bars are classified by ABC as "restaurants" and have to serve at least a certain amount of food in order to be able to sell alcohol.

So I've used ABC's license search to reproduce this map at a local level - this time including breweries, clubs, and restaurants that serve alcohol (though I didn't count hotels).  This might be casting the net a little too wide for the term "bar," but it's more accurate than not counting restaurants with ABC licenses - most of which have a bar of some kind or function as one after hours.  I came up with a statewide number of 1,048 people per establishment.  Unsurprisingly, college towns and tourism destinations lead the way.  You can make some loose correlations with income or with median age - but both have a lot of outliers.



Top 20/Bottom 20: