Nothing drives home the fact that we live in a federalist system like moving to a new state and trying to figure out where and when you can buy alcohol.
In some states, like California, you can buy beer, wine and liquor at the grocery store. In others, you can buy beer at the supermarket but need to make a separate trip to the liquor store to buy wine and hard alcohol. In still others, like Utah, alcoholic beverages can only be purchased at state-run facilities.
A good way to get a bird's-eye-view of the legal booze landscape is to look at what types of alcohol you can and can't buy at your local supermarket. Using information from the National Alcohol Beverage Control Association (NABCA) and other sources, I put together the following map.
Let's take a look at the big national trends.
The Southwest is a free-for-all
Perhaps reflecting the region's Wild West roots, you can buy pretty much anything you want, alcohol-wise, in grocery stores running from northern California, through Nevada, and all the way into Arizona and New Mexico.
So is the Midwest — with one big exception
The situation in most of the Midwest is similar, with beer, wine and liquor available in supermarkets all the way from Indiana to Wyoming. But Minnesota is a notable outlier — no booze in grocery stores in the North Star State.
Supermarkets in Minnesota (and in four other states -- Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma and Utah) are allowed to sell beer with a low alcohol content — 3.2 percent alcohol. By contrast, your typical can of Budweiser America has 5 percent alcohol, and Bud Light has 4.2 percent. Most people don't consider low-alcohol "near-beer" to be quite the same as actual beer, and if you live outside of the five states that sell only low-alcohol beer in grocery stores, you've probably never even come across it. So I'm considering these states to be in the "no alcohol sales" category in the map above.