BeerCation!
Posted by | Uncategorized | Posted on October 18th, 2006
Mango and I went on a beer vacation this past weekend! It was a load of fun, and we got to try tons of new beer.
Day 1: We loaded everything up in the car and took off for Knoxville, TN for the Knoxville Brewer’s Jam.
Basically, you pay $20 for a ticket and they hand you a small (4 – 6
oz) sample glass that you can get filled as many times as you
can! If that’s not a good deal I’m not sure what is.
There were about 38 different breweries represented there, of which we
sampled around 24. We tried to hit as many of our “local”
breweries as we could … anything from TN or NC. We only found a
very few beers that we didn’t really like; most were good to
excellent. Sunday morning was … a little rough.
Fortunately we had a hotel around three blocks away (the Hotel St.
Oliver in downtown K-ville) so there was no driving involved.
Day 2: Popped a couple of generic Aleve and a B-vitamin
along with about a half gallon of water and walked down the block to a
little diner for a nice big greasy breakfast. Once we were
feeling relatively human again, we set out for our final vacation
destination: Asheville, NC. It’s just a couple of hours
from Knoxville, and the scenery made for a great drive. The
leaves were starting to change up in the Appalachian Mountains, so we
had some awesome views as we climbed up and over.
We arrived in Asheville without incident and checked in to the
Renaissance Hotel (Thank you, Priceline!) We were still feeling
pretty beat, but we did eventually manage to drag ourselves out of the
hotel room for a hike around the downtown Asheville area. Lots of
neat old buildings, and the city felt a lot like our trip to
Portland. After a while we got hungry and decided to look around
for our first brewery destination. We eventually settled on the Asheville Pizza and Brewing Company. I gotta tell you … Cookeville needs
one of these. It’s a pizza place … a brewery … and a movie
theater, all in one. We paid $2 each for the movie and watched
“Barnyard” while we drank a pitcher of ESB and munched on one of their
very tasty pizzas.
On a semi-related note, I have decided that one of our next brew days
needs to include an ESB. I had so many good ones on this trip
that I’ve basically been craving them for about a week now.
Day 3: We woke up nice and late and had a leisurly
breakfast at a little bakery that we found on our ramblings. We
also loaded up a black-bean-and-rice salad along with a big ol’ roast
beef sandwich for a picnic and headed out to the mountains.
We drove up the Blue Ridge Parkway and into the Pisgah National Forest
looking for a particular trail that was supposedly about a 4 mile round
trip. Despite semi-carefully writing down the directions from the
park service’s website we were never able to actually find the trail we
were looking for … but we did eventually locate a trailhead. It
was around this time that we were glad we packed “heavy” .. an extra
jacket each with hats and gloves. It was probably 40 degrees out
with the wind gusting around 30 miles per hour. It even started
to sleet on us at one point. We did around 3 – 4 miles and sat
down to eat our picnic lunch on a concrete picnic table … which
promptly stole all of our body heat through our posteriors. We
pretty much gave up on hiking any more at this point… game called on
account of frozen butt and impending rain. We cruised around the
parkway a little more and then headed back to Asheville.
That night we decided to head to a brewpub called Jack of the Wood.
(The brewery is actually called Green Man.) I’d heard a little
bit about this place from a friend that lives in Knoxville, but wasn’t
entirely sure what to expect. This was a really cool place….
lots of Celtic style artwork and such on the walls, and a bunch of neat
looking wrought-iron artwork all over the place (even in the
restrooms!). It was in this brewery that I found what was
probably my favorite beer of the whole trip … their ESB was
awesome. This is in no way meant to say that any of the other
beer I had was bad … but wow this was good. We hung out and ate
dinner and tried to play a trivia game along with the other patrons…
and quickly discovered that we were no good at this style of trivia
game.
Day 4: It rained on us all day, which pretty much spoiled
our last change to go out and hike around in the mountains. We
also decided that we had several breweries left to visit, and only one
more full day to check them out, so we started early. Relatively
early, anyway. We hit a small restraunt for
breakfast-lunch-whatever at around 11:30. I tried an organic nut
brown ale from Vermont which was pretty tasty but seemed kinda
thin. I think I have a picture of it which I hope to post to
Flickr later as I don’t really remember what it was called.
After lunch we walked down the street to Barley’s Taproom, a bar that sits pretty much directly over the brewery for the Highland Brewing Company.
Walking up to the door we could tell that Highland was in the middle of
a batch .. a powerful smell of malt and hops permeated the entire
area. Just like when I brew stuff at home, but multiplied by
about 100 and over a couple of city blocks. We tried a couple of
Highland’s brews as well as some others (Catawba Valley, for instance)
that we probably wouldn’t be able to visit. We even tried to go
downstairs to check out Highland’s operation, but they were in the
middle of shovelling grain out of their mash tun and didn’t have a lot
of time to talk with us. We peered in through the open doors and
admired the brewing setup (at least as much as we could see.)
At this point we decided to go visit the French Broad Brewing Company
(the site plays music when you open it, so don’t be surprised.)
We even got to sit down and drink a couple of beers along with some of
the brewers, who were all there for a double brew day (2 15 barrell
batches to mostly fill a 35 barrel fermenter) – a process that they say
takes around 18 hours. We didn’t stay quite that long, but we did
play with the brewery dog (named Melee … quite a set of jaws on that
puppy) and try a sample of everything that they had on tap. The
ESB at French Broad was mighty tasty as well, so I was forced (forced,
I tell you!) to have a pint of it after we’d finished off the samples.
We decided that we’d had a lot of beer and not much food at this point,
so we headed over to a Sushi/Thai place for lunch (this being 5 or
6pm). Of course I continued with my beer sampling along with
lunch … tried an Asahi (which their website lists as Japan’s #1 beer)
… pretty tasty for a light lager, but not really my favorite type of
beer.
After lunch we headed back to the hotel to chug down some water and
hang out for a bit… apparently drinking beer can be quite
exhausting! We did muster enough energy (mostly because we got
hungry again about 9 I think) to head back out to the Asheville Pizza
and Brewing company for a late showing of “Talladega Nights,” a pitcher
of Golden Ale, and another tasty pizza.
Day 5: The end of a wonderful vacation. We loaded
everything up and bid Asheville a fond farewell. All in all a
great vacation!