Beer Traveling
Lew Bryson’s Pennsylvania Breweries guidebook is not just full of information, it’s also a book you can sit down and read for fun. He’s got a relaxed writing style and each entry focuses on the brewery and the people that make the beer. This is not a book about the beers you will find (though notable highlights from each brewery are listed), but about the breweries and brewers themselves. In addition to the Introduction there are six other essays included in the book that divide the different regional sections. Each essay can be read on its own.
Since I was on a beer vacation and traveling with my family, I was interested in Lew Bryson’s essay on “Beer Traveling.” Just about every trip I take (for whatever reason) will feature some beer hunting. I travel a few times a year for my day job (recall my recent trip to Baltimore) and I make sure to hit the area brewpubs. Every couple of years my wife and I (and now my son) will take a beer vacation. Well, it’s a beer vacation for me and my wife. For my son, this trip through Eastern Pennsylvania has been a chocolate vacation. Gotta keep it fun for the whole family, right?
Beer travel should be paired with other activities. For example, on this trip we limited our brewpub visits to one per day, spending lunch at the day’s designated venue. In the mornings, during the first part of the trip when we were staying in Hershey, we spent the morning at the Hershey Lodge’s indoor pool and then took in one of the “Hershey Attractions” before lunch at a brewpub. Then, in the afternoon, we would usually explore the town the brewpub is in, finding little independent toy shops, book stores, bead shops, drum shops, etc. The evening meal was all about food. Except for Wednesday evening when we returned to Bube’s Brewery to eat in the Catacombs, all of our evening meals where at regular restaurants, so I could just relax, enjoy the food, and not worry about taking notes and pictures. Of course, unless you are beer writer too, you won’t have to worry about taking notes and pictures unless you want to. Still, when you are on week long brewpub tour, you’ll want to do other things than drink beer.
