Federal behavioral risk factor data places Austin, Texas at the top of its list of major cities with the highest alcohol consumption, according to an Aug. 7 Forbes.com report.

While Forbes acknowledges that use of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2007 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) doesn't offer the ideal method for measuring drinking behavior, it does present useful information on regional variations that comes directly from citizens. Other cities that made Forbes' list of the five most heavy-drinking metropolitan areas were Milwaukee, San Francisco, Providence, R.I., and Chicago.

Austin, with a number of high-profile festivals and a large university community, ranked high on a variety of drinking measures, including 20.6 percent of residents saying in the CDC survey that they engaged in binge drinking. Milwaukee, which placed second in the analysis, once was the top beer producer in the nation and has been referred to as "the nation's watering hole."

Looking at data for the 40 largest metropolitan statistical areas in the country, Forbes based its rankings of heavy-drinking cities largely on responses to three questions from the CDC survey: whether residents had at least one drink in the past month, whether men had more than two drinks a day or women one drink a day, and whether residents had consumed five or more drinks on one occasion.

Forbes issued the caveat that a city's high ranking does not necessarily mean that the community houses many irresponsible drinkers, since some individuals drink daily in moderation because of reported health benefits from alcohol.