BetterBeerBlog

This month on the Session, BetterBeerBlog friends Gail and Steve from Beer by Bart pose the topic, “Will travel for beer”. They want to know about our beer trips, good and bad, in every little detail. If you’ve never traveled specifically for beer, where would you like to go, who would you like to go with and what would you drink?

Sammy and I talk about this all the time. Relatively speaking, we are pretty new to the world of craft beer. I had the domain “BetterBeerBlog” registered, posted a few beer reviews, and then didn’t do anything with the website for months. Believe it or not, we’ve been at this for less than two years. What a couple of years it’s been though! We’ve drank a lot of good beers, a handful of great beers and even a couple of bad ones (can’t win them all). We’ve been blessed to have met such really cool people in our short time in the craft beer world and, surprisingly, have been able to do some traveling as well. Which brings us back to the topic at hand, traveling for beer.

Around the time of our first year anniversary, my wife and I decided to go on a trip to commemorate the event. Our initial plan was to attend the Northern California Homebrewers Festival (isn’t my wife the coolest wife ever? Yes, I’m biased, I know…). Specifically, we wanted to attend the Sean Paxton Homebrew dinner. It’s one of the many highlights of the trip and sells out early. By the time my lazy ass got to booking the trip, the dinner was sold out. A bit dejected that our original plans fell through, we decided to drive south and visit San Diego instead.

Excited by our new found destination, Sammy and I planned our trip. I left the sight seeing and hotel accommodations to my wife while I researched what breweries to visit. I planned the majority of our trip through www.beermapping.com. I found that website to be a great resource for deciding which breweries to visit. If anything, it helped us plan our days. I’m not sure about how anyone else travels but we left a lot of flexibility in our schedules in case we received some hot tips from any locals.

Because I dislike Los Angeles and LA county in general, we usually travel I-5 at night. I like to avoid LA traffic as much as possible and traveling at night is the best way for me to avoid that nightmare. Besides, if you’ve ever traveled I-5, it is not the most picturesque freeway so it’s not like I’d be missing much traveling at night.

Here’s a list of the places we hit up in wonderful bullet point form (If I’ve linked to them, it’s because I’ve written about them.):

• Pizza Port Solana Beach
• Lost Abbey/Pizza Port
• Alesmith
• Toronado (yes, there’s a San Diego version)
• O’Briens
• Churchill’s Pub & Grill
• Stone Brewing
• Holiday Wine Cellar

I can’t believe I didn’t get to finish the Stone recap or the Holiday Wine Cellar spotlight. Stone has a phenomenal location while Holiday Wine Cellar has a mighty fine wine collection and a very good beer collection as well. Holiday Wine Cellar was a local suggestion which is why it is important to leave a little flexibility in your schedule.

As fun as it was to visit some of these places, we just couldn’t hit all the breweries and bars we wanted to. When we return (it’s not a question of “if” but “when”), we will have Green Flash and Alesmith on our list of breweries to visit while Ritual is a beer bar we didn’t get the opportunity to try.

San Diego does not suck. All I can say is while beer may be the reason you visit San Diego, it will not be the reason you want to stay. San Diego has awesome weather, great people and great places to visit. Sammy and I compared San Diego to all that is good about the Bay Area. It has the arts, niche neighborhoods and hills of San Diego, the laid-back, beach attitudes of Santa Cruz and the technology centers of San Jose. Of all the places we’ve gone to so far, San Diego induces the least amount of homesickness.

The idea of traveling near or far for beer is not new. People have made careers out of it, written books about it and plan their yearly vacations around it. A huge part of traveling for beer is for the beer. You never know where you’ll find the next “hidden gem” or reacquaint yourself with a personal favorite. Most importantly, you never know who you’re going to end up meeting. I must sound like a broken record at this point but the people we’ve met because of craft beer have been nothing short of awesome (Well, there was that one couple at NHC…). If anything, the beer is the reason for travel but the people is why we return.

Have beer? BetterBeerBlog will travel.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 3rd, 2009 at 1:58 am and is filed under The Session. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.