Beer Traveling - Stick with the Plan
Go into a brewpub with a plan and stick to it. If you’ll be driving your car (like we were on this trip) you’ll need a volunteer to pilot the car when lunch is over, or something to do afterward that is within walking distance. My wife assumed the designated driving duties for this Pennsylvania brewpub tour. (I’ll find a way to pay her back.) She likes beer and would take little sips from the ones I thought were the best, but she didn’t have a glass of her own.
I’m usually a pint-o-beer man. I like to order a pint of whatever I’m drinking. That’s the only way to really experience it fully and to track its flavor characteristics over an hour of casual sipping. Normally, I have two pints and then I’m done. This is fine for brewpub outings near where I live, but having pints of beer on a brewpub tour is not the best way to maximize one’s sampling. So this week I gave up my usual pint ordering habits and confined myself to ordering the beer sampler trays.
A beer sampler is usually a 4 to 5 ounce serving of each of the brewpub’s current line-up. Some wise brewpub owners limit the samplers to 6 different beers and give you a choice about what you want to sample. Before you start drinking, do the math. Six 5 ounce glasses of beer equals 30 ounces of beer. That’s roughly two American pints. If you are a two-pint man (like myself), once you are done with your six sampler sized glasses, you are done; you don’t need to order one more pint to celebrate the fact you finished the sampler.
The reason I’m going on about this is that (if you are like me) you don’t want to be making the beer drinking decisions after you’ve had those six sampler-sized glasses. Yes, you will want to order that pint. But don’t do it unless you know you can handle that third pint.
I ran into an interesting (and new for me) scenario at the Appalachian Brewing Company in Harrisburg. I ordered the sampler tray and the waitress brought me eight 5 ounces glasses—that’s two and half pints. Later after I was about halfway through the sampler tray I asked the waitress if these were all the beers they currently had on the menu. She told me there were three more and returned with three more 5 ounce glasses. Count them. Twelve 5 ounce glasses. Part of your plan should be knowing how to deal with this situation. You don’t have to finish all the beer. It’s perfectly acceptable to leave beer behind. The beer gods will not be angry; quiet the opposite, they will smile on you for being a wise and responsible appreciator of beer.
