Beer Travel: Drinking Beer at the Source

What’s your favorite beer?

Your go-to brew that you pull out of the fridge on a Friday evening.  The bottle of suds that you toast with your friends?

Is it something produced in a massive factory halfway around the world?  Or perhaps a limited production craft offering made only once a year?

In either case, have you ever considered visiting the brewery where the beer is produced, to try drinking the beer at the source?

Beer Travel – Drinking Beer at the Source

One of my “must do” items while traveling is to visit local breweries.  My normal weekend day-trip while living in the Netherlands is to find a new local brewery to visit. During my recent six month stay in San Diego, I think I visited at least 25 different breweries.

Why?

For me, there are a number of benefits to beer travel and drinking beer at the source.

Selection and Opportunity

First and foremost for me are selection and opportunity.  Most breweries don’t widely distribute the majority of their beers. It’s just not always cost effective.  When you look at a brewery’s section in your favorite beer retailer, you may see five or six different products on offer. But when you visit the brewery itself, you will often find between eight and 24 different beers on draft, and more perhaps available in bottles.  Sometimes these even include rare, limited edition products that can often run $25 US or more for a single 750-ml bottle!

The best part of this is that you don’t have to buy and open a whole bottle just to taste the beer. Usually from around $1-$3 US, you’ll be able to enjoy just a small sample of the beer you want, alongside the many other beers they offer that you might not have otherwise purchased. And perhaps, just maybe, this will lead to a serendipitous encounter with a new favorite beer.

Connection and Roots

The other primary reason I like to visit the brewery is to build some kind of connection to the source.  I’ve been to the Abbaye Notre-Dame de Saint-Remy in Rochefort, Belgium now three times, twice in the past two months, and still have never seen the inside of the brewery or sipped a beer on the premises. They don’t offer tours of the brewery, and there is no cafe on-site, for this you would need to go into the village. But just making the trip to the abbaye, walking around the grounds a little, seeing the buildings and the surroundings, all help me feel a little more connected to the beer.

Sometimes, seeing the brewery itself will also give a little more appreciation for all the hard work that goes into the brewing process as well.  It doesn’t matter if it’s at a small operation such as Palau Brewing Company on the Pacific Island of Palau, or a behemoth like Guinness Brewhouse #3 in Dublin, or the new Brewhouse #4 which I was priveleged to get a sneak peak of during the European Beer Bloggers Conference this year. When you’re walking through the facility, seeing the brewers in action, smelling the aromas of the process, and then following this up with a sample of the freshest beer on offer, this is a treat you have to experience when you get the chance!

What about you?  Do you enjoy visiting breweries on your travels?  Why do you take time on your travel schedule to drink beer at the source?

This article is written in participation with Session #93, hosted by The Roaming Pint.  The Session is a monthly event for the beer blogging community which was started by Stan Hieronymus at Appellation Beer. On the first Friday of each month, all participating bloggers write about a predetermined topic. Each month a different blog is chosen to host The Session, choose the topic, and post a roundup of all the responses received. For more info on The Session, check out the Brookston Beer Bulletin’s archive page.

Round-up of all posts from Session #93 is now available on The Roaming Pint.