I will readily confess to enjoying beer, though I have always considered myself more of an aficionado than a connoisseur. I appreciate that the world of (readily available to me) beer has expanded from what was available when I was coming of age (see my previous post) to what we have today, and specifically the proliferation of local breweries. I do sometimes wonder if we have reached “peak craft beer” but there isn’t a brewery on every street corner yet, so perhaps not. (It was amusing to me that when we visited Clara in Austin, in the less-than-a-mile walk from our hotel to her apartment, we passed by two breweries, but that’s Austin!)
This summer, with the help of friends, I cooked up a scheme to get a group of folks to visit more local breweries, and I put together a “Brewery Passport” with a page for each local brewery, and some extra pages for more remote breweries that people might visit in their travels. I even wrote software to generate the pages from a spreadsheet containing relevant data about each brewery, and a photo and name of each participant. A good friend took the resulting booklets and hand-bound them into covers made from six-pack holders. The artifact itself is one of my favorite creations of all time.
On the 29th of June, we had a kickoff event at a local beer hall (which some have mistaken for a brewery…) where we distributed the 20 passports to participants, and agreed to meet again on the 15th of September to celebrate our dubious accomplishments. The listed breweries were all within 10 miles, most within about 5, so they were almost all very bikeable. The idea was that people would plan a trip to a brewery and announce it via a WhatsApp group we created for the purpose, so that others could join in. That didn’t seem to catch on in the group, however. But people did like the idea of visiting local breweries, and some even thought of it as a climate-friendly way of enjoying local tourism.
By the end, I managed to visit all 24 of the original listed breweries (3 of them on the second to last day!), walking or biking to 17 of them. In addition to that, I visited 30 other breweries this summer. Many of those were still within Massachusetts, but not bikeable (not by me, anyway) and were part of the Mass Brewers’ Guild passport program. Amusingly, I thought that my Brewery Passport was a completely novel idea, but I have come to learn that there are, and have been, many such programs (I do think that my passports are the best of all those that I’ve seen, though). Some of those extra 30 were visited during our travels this summer, in Rhode Island and Texas.
I thoroughly enjoyed the activity, and when I asked bartenders if they had a brewery stamp, and showed them the passport, that would often be the start of a very interesting conversation, which wouldn’t have taken place otherwise. And that’s what I did on my summer vacation.