Lithuania split

This was also brought up in Bulgaria topic. I guess again not a high priority, but I agree that they have strong beer tradition, so split may be at least considered. No idea about the actual regions, but wikipedia offers this: Counties of Lithuania - Wikipedia
Looks pretty straight forward with 10 regions, but any local input or input from someone who knows the region would be welcomed. Not sure how many regions have breweries.

Note: as I mentioned in Bulgaria topic, we shouldn’t split Latvia at the moment, because they will change the regions soon + there is no sane way to do it at the moment.

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Looks good. I suppose one question that can be asked is whether we need to write “County” after each of them.

As for whether each region has a brewery, from a quick glance at our brewery list here it seems like most of them do.

Maybe @larsga can provide some insight as the author of a great guide to Lithuanian beer (which I unfortunately only discovered after having visited the country :neutral_face:)?

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I think the division in 10 looks reasonable, although it’s perhaps a little finer-grained than necessary, and some of these administrative boundaries don’t match the cultural boundaries very well.

In a beer context the Lithuanians themselves often refer to the cultural regions instead, so they’ll talk about the breweries of Aukštaitija, for example, and how Dzūkija had no brewing tradition, etc. Samogitia is also a term that’s used quite frequently, and it definitely had a more German-inspired brewing tradition.

I think either works. The culturall regions have the benefit of being better known and just plain fewer in number.

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I’m not huge fan of using cultural regions. There are some big problems:

  1. They never respect the country borders. So part of the the cultural region often stays in another country (for example in Estonia Setomaa is very unique region, but chunk of it is Russia. There is even road in Setomaa that crosses Russia, you’re not legally allowed to stop on that road.) Hence you will end up with something that is kind of cultural region, but actually isn’t.
  2. The borders of cultural region are hard to define (even wiki article says that about Lithuania regions). Often there are historically significant places that both regions want to claim and/or their may be places that no one wants to claim (as there are some bad history).
  3. It is harder to admin, if it is not well defined. It can easily happen that some brewery on the border defines itself as belonging to other region. Will we then move the region border?!

The main advantage of using cultural regions is that there are less of them, but considering how many regions we will have, I don’t think this will matter here anyway.

Of course I may be wrong and maybe these things are better defined than I think. I know that in Estonia I would be against using cultural regions, but doesn’t mean it can’t be different for Lithuania.

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Any resolution here guys? Thoughts? This is pretty high up on list of wanted countries in voting, so I’m sending lists to services now for the others. Need to made a decision here.

Agree that cultural reasons should not be used. Borders need to be discreet and easily definable.

So are these what we should use? And how should the naming go?

1 – Vilnius City Municipality
2 – Kaunas City Municipality
3 – Klaipėda City Municipality

4 – Panevėžys City Municipality
5 – Šiauliai City Municipality
6 – Alytus City Municipality

7 – Birštonas Municipality
8 – Palanga City Municipality
9 – Visaginas Municipality
10 – Neringa Municipality

Wikipedia article is formatted badly (scroll down from the city municipality thing), as I understand the correct list is actually:

1 - Alytus County
2 - Kaunas County
3 - Klaipėda County
4 - Marijampolė County
5 - Panevėžys County
6 - Šiauliai County
7 - Tauragė County
8 - Telšiai County
9 - Utena County
10 - Vilnius County

Again, not expert on Lithuania, so hope someone can reconfirm.

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