EXTRA...

Most Cape towns make "Most Liquor Licenses" list

13 Cape towns in Top 75 list with most liquor licenses per resident

Only Bourne, Mashpee and Sandwich not on list with Wareham the "driest"

By Walter Brooks

It's a lot easier to get a bottle of booze in Brewster than in Boston. That's because Brewster has a liquor license ratio of one license for every 501 man, woman and child in that bucolic seaside town.

Brewster is on a list of the 75 Massachusetts town with the most liquor license per resident, and only three Cape town escape the list.

Is tourism to blame, or to thank

Apologists claims it's because Cape Cod is a major vacation destination, so we must have more restaurants - with liquor available - to accommodate this major part of our economy.

In fact, most research suggests tourism (euphemistically now renamed the hospitality industry) accounts for well over half of all the dollars spent on Cape Cod each year, and it is spent in a four-month period. Tourism also employs huge numbers of our residents, and half the restaurants here would be out of business in a heartbeat without the credit cards being flashed by our the 5-8 million visitors every summer.

What towns are "driest"?

The just-off Cape town of Wareham is at the "driest" of  the 75 towns with the most liquor licenses with one for every 556 residents while Provincetown has a liquor license for every 54 residents, and is the "wettest."

That works with the vacation area explanation - who vacations ion Wareham?

Wellfleet is the "third wettest" with a license for every 103 residents and two Martha's Vineyard towns, Oak Bluffs and Edgartown, are next wettest with 128 and 130 residents per license.

Plymouth is among the "driest" with 535, and Fair Haven is drier with 556 per capita.

Of the fifteen towns on the Cape, only Bourne, Mashpee and Sandwich are not in the top 75 towns listing per capita liquor licenses.

Cape Cod is a sandspit held together by liquor stores

The list goes on with almost every Cape Cod town in the top 75 statewide. Here's the breakdown showing number of residents per license across the Cape and on The Islands and the South Shore starting with the "driest" to the "wettest", but "dry" ain't too dry when you are among the 75 wettest in Massachusetts which has more than 350 towns:

• Wareham - 556
• Fair Haven 556
• Cohasset - 552
• Mattapoisett - 536
• Plymouth - 535
• West Bridgewater - 513
• Brewster - 501
• Eastham - 495
• Foxborough - 479
• Harwich - 442
• Falmouth - 437
• Yarmouth - 428
• Barnstable - 417
• Tisbury - 345
• Dennis - 291
• Chatham - 258
• Orleans - 233
• Truro - 213
• Aquinnah - 177
• Nantucket - 144
• Edgartown - 130
• Oak Bluffs - 128
• Wellfleet - 105
• Provincetown - 57

And you all thought Wareham was such a wicked place - phooey.

Move to The Vineyard and get blitzed easier.

Boston TV Channel 5 WCVB makes it fun to see whether your town is on the list of the "Top 75 Massachusetts Towns with the Most Liquor Licenses per Resident" here.

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