Beer Vacation Write Ups

Concord, CA to Medford, OR

My wife and I flew from Michigan in early April with an itinerary to visit with our daughter in Concord and to celebrate our grandson's third birthday. We planned to stay there for a few days after the party to help them pack their possessions because they were relocating to North Carolina. After that we would rent a car and brewery hop our way to another's place near Medford, OR. The intent was to go to Santa Rosa for two days to visit Russian River and a few other breweries in the area. Then on to Sacramento, Chico and Redding to visit breweries in each city.

Unfortunately our progress in packing things in Concord was so far behind schedule so that we nixed the Santa Rosa visit to stay two more days to help finish the packing for moving. But while we were in Concord we had dinner at a couple places that I lised listed on BA on prior visits. Concord Tap House always has a very good beer menu of draft beers, plus I'll guess around 100 beers in cans/bottles. https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/61601/

The second place in Concord is called Eureka! and is a bit more formal in its vibe. The beer list is pretty good, and the food is better. https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/61601/

After leaving Concord we managed to visit three breweries in the Sacramento area. We chose Urban Roots first https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/52529/, then Geisthaus https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/69885/ and then Fieldwork https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/47516/. Geisthaus doesn't have food so that affected my rating I probably should bump it up just because of the slow-pour Landbier that they offer), and the food (bbq at Urban Roots and pizza at Fieldwork). The bbq probably caused some bias in my ratings, so Urban Roots was my favorite of the three.

Taplist at Concord Tap House


Sampler flight plus slow-pour Landbier at Geisthaus

 

I am interested in writing and consuming them.

My beer trips vary anywhere from me going on a three brewery bender in some random place my work sends me, to extending one of those trips on either end because it gets me "close enough" to something interesting, or a full on beer vacation when I usually have some other food/music/sports interests in a given trip and hit up some quality breweries in the given cities.

 

As a follow up to my earlier, much less serious Cape May County beverage campaign post, here is the more straightforward version of that trip.

My wife and I went to Cape May County from Friday, July 23 to Monday, July 26, 2021. It was a combined birthday getaway and short vacation, with our stay based in the Villas area outside Cape May proper. That location worked well because it gave us easy access to Cape May, Cape May Court House, Rio Grande, and the surrounding brewery and distillery stops without feeling like we had to stay directly in the busiest part of town.

On Friday, we drove down from Collingswood and stopped at COHO Brewing Company before checking in. It was a good first stop and a nice way to ease into the trip before settling in. Later that evening was more food focused, with dinner at The Ebbitt Room, and my first dirty martini.

Saturday was the strongest day from a beer and beverage standpoint. We visited Nauti Spirits earlier in the day, then went back to the Airbnb for a break before heading out again to Gusto Brewing Company. Gusto was the standout beer stop for me. I remember the beer being strong, the service being excellent, and the overall taproom experience feeling very focused and welcoming. Even though it was not a large or elaborate space, the fundamentals were handled well, and that made the visit memorable.

On Sunday, we stopped at Slack Tide Brewing Company before going to Cape May Distilling. Slack Tide was part of the broader Cape May County drinks route for us, though Gusto remained the beer highlight of the weekend. Cape May Distilling added a nice change of pace afterward and helped round out the trip beyond beer alone.

We did not visit Cape May Brewing Company on that trip, which is probably worth noting since many people would naturally associate Cape May beer travel with that stop first. For us, the weekend ended up being more about smaller stops, local movement, and letting the beer, spirits, food, and lodging all connect into one relaxed trip.

So if I were writing this as an actual beer vacation recap, that would be my main takeaway: it does not have to be a massive brewery checklist to be worthwhile. A good home base, a few well chosen stops, good service, and enough time to rest between places can make a short beer focused getaway feel complete.

 

CA to OR (continued)

After leaving Sacramento we listened to GPS for the route to Chico and Sierra Nevada Brewing. It's crazy that the route is part divided 4-lane and part two-lane with several small towns and their mis-timed stoplights! But we finally arrived in Chico and went straight to Sierra Nevada because we were famished. This isn't your typical brewpub. It's a large, open dining area that has a formal decor, and the size of the place made me think 'ballroom' with a bar. Suffice to say, the beers were very good and so was the food.

View of half of the 'ballroom' at Sierra Nevada


I relied again on GPS to get from Chico to Redding. It seemed a little easier, but it still was a drive that seemed long. In Redding we chose to go to Final Draft Brewing for dinner and beers. Regardless that on paper there were other, better-looking breweries in town, we chose this brewery because they had a beer on tap that is the same as our daughter's name (so why not, it's family?). The long and short of it is that this is one of those breweries where the food appears to be so much better than the beers (read my review for details) based on our limited experience.

Food a Final Draft


The next day we drove to a resort near Ashland, Oregon, to spend a weekend in a rustic setting in the mountains and to celebrate this daughter's birthday. We had several bottles of Pliny the Elder and a couple other Russian River beers that we bought in Concord, so no breweries were visited in Oregon. Coincidently, this daughter and her husband had just bought a country house about 20 miles away from their current house, and found out the possession date while we were at the resort would be in two days. They were anxious to move and had most of their possessions already packed, but we extended our trip a couple days to help them load the Pod and the rented truck, and then start the unloading process before we had to leave for our flight home.

So the trip didn't involve as much beer as I had planned, and it involved a lot more work than what we expected, but we arrived home with several days to recuperate before we had further commitments that needed our attention.

 

I think it was your review of the place and the beers that you had that I referred to in my Place review. I was forewarned.

 

Sounds like they need to run through way more rough drafts than whatever their current standard is! cmon, Someone had to make the joke

 

Excellent write up! What is your preferred method for posting photos? I'm eager to crack the code so I can provide sufficient write-ups myself

 

Thanks for the compliment.

I take the pics with my phone, and they are automatically saved to Google Pics. I download them to my PC do some editing if necessary (mostly the lighting), then upload them to Imgur.com, then to my BA post. (I first uploaded the pics on yesterday's report with my new laptop with Win11 and it reacted differently than what happens with my other laptop with Win10, so I have to look into that and maybe switch to a new service.)

Unfortunately these beer travel reports won't contain many pics with the two per post limit. But that's why I split my report into two posts. I had 15 pics selected to post with the report, but that ain't going to happen.

 

I assume that you mean Place reviews in your post. All 5 of the breweries in my report are in the database, but it looks like I overlooked placing links in the second part of my report. Here they are:

Sierra Nevada. https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/140/

Final Draft.
https://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/53790/

 

New England Tour (Part 1) MA → RI → CT → MA

The red-eye landed at 5:30am and already the mission parameters were clear: get a beer into this body as fast as civilizationally permissible. Logan had other ideas. The airport, that great humming terrarium of fluorescent obligation, held me in its grip with the particular cruelty of a place designed to make time meaningless. The rental car shuttle circled the airport like it was looking for a parking spot in purgatory. When I finally broke free, I hit the gas with a suitcase full of clothes and a second, conspicuously empty one. That second bag was not a mistake. It was a prophecy.

Rhode Island first. The logic was geographic and the hunger was real. Cafe Locale materialized with exactly what the body needed: crab cake Benedict, a mocha of some variety, the kind of breakfast that tells you the day has been thought about. It hadn't been, entirely, but the food didn't need to know that.

Still too early for what I actually came for. Staring down the maps over a second coffee, the calculus was simple: find whatever in a westerly direction cracks the doors soonest, and keep moving. Providence offered itself as a waiting room, at least a scenic one. A walk. An hour. The city going about its morning with complete indifference to the fact that I had not slept on a plane and was operating on crab cake and caffeine momentum.

Uncommon Pair opened at 11 and I was there when they unlocked it. A fast pint, good, no notes, no lingering, and then back in the car. Connecticut was calling, and Fox Farm doesn't wait for anyone who stands around being sentimental about Rhode Island.

Fox Farm arrived on a day that had clearly been ordered from a catalog. The sky was doing everything right, the fields were green in that aggressively pastoral Connecticut way, and every angle of the property looked like it had been pre-approved by a content team. Beautiful, genuinely, and also teeming. It took half a lap around the grounds just to decode the geography of the place, weaving through an obstacle course of toddlers operating at full throttle and adults who had clearly decided that noon on a Friday was a perfectly reasonable time to be navigating with a lean. I was, by a significant margin, the most sober human on the property. Excluding the screaming ones in the grass, who had their own chemistry going.

Cask ale on the menu made the decision for me before I'd finished reading. Then another. Then a careful survey of the bottles and cans available to go, several wild ales and IPAs selected with the quiet seriousness of a man stocking a safe house. Which, in a sense, I was.

I sat. I savored. There was a moment, watching the lawn contingent absolutely losing their minds in the afternoon sun, where I considered joining them. Screaming into the sky, rolling in the grass, full regression. Then I remembered: I spend most of my life being regarded as the unhinged one in the room. This trip was my furlough from that reputation. I went inside instead and found the bar, where a loose confederation of locals wanted to talk sports. Yankees-Sox ran its predictable course. I offered the west coast perspective, which they received with the polite confusion of people who knew, abstractly, that other baseball teams existed somewhere out there.

Then Worcester. Hotel. Uber to Treehouse and the situation changed dramatically.

The place was running at a frequency that made the Fox Farm chaos look like a library. Money was moving through that taproom the way it does when an entire regional economy has quietly decided that one building is load-bearing. Pints going out, cans going out, merchandise going out, the staff moving with the practiced efficiency of people who have long since stopped being surprised by any of this. The adults, by this hour, had achieved a volume sufficient to finally overwhelm the children, and the whole thing had tipped into a glorious, roaring, completely unhinged Friday night at a brewery in Massachusetts. Several IPAs of the Treehouse variety, that specific mouthfeel, that specific dankness, the kind that makes you understand immediately why people drive hours for this.

Back at the hotel. Fox Farm beers from the bag, horizontal on the bed, the first day of the trip finally running out of road. Whatever day two had in store, it would have to wait until morning.

All 50 Progress after Day 1:


TL;DR

Uncommon Pair — Strange beers doing their own thing, not chasing trends or approval. Friendly owner, dive bar DNA with a fermentation permit. Not a destination, but if you're in Providence and the doors are open, you could do a lot worse.

Fox Farm — The vibe alone earns the visit. Property is gorgeous, cask was exactly what it needed to be, and the to-go selection is serious. Critically for those of us hauling a suitcase with a 50lb ceiling and airline math on the brain: they sell by the can, which is how you fill a bag responsibly and still make it to the gate without a surcharge.

Treehouse — The beers are exactly as good as everyone says. That part of the reputation is fully earned. The property is beautiful. But Treehouse has crossed into a scale where the warmth that makes craft beer worth traveling for gets harder to find. It runs like a very well-oiled machine, and there's nothing wrong with that exactly, it just means you're a transaction rather than a conversation. The community feel that makes this whole pursuit worthwhile showed up more clearly at the other stops on this trip.

 

New England Tour (Part 2) MA → Stowe, VT → Greensboro, VT → Waitsfield, VT → Waterbury, VT

Day two arrived at 7am with all the grace of a tuba playing taps. The body registered the hour as an act of aggression and filed a formal complaint that went nowhere. The Fairfield breakfast was waiting downstairs, cheerful in its mediocrity, fully committed to the bit. Whoever engineered the powdered eggs had decided that salt and pepper were a sufficient intervention, which is the kind of thinking that gets people fired in a just world. The pancakes, by contrast, were holding together with more structural integrity than anything else on the plate, which is a damning sentence if you sit with it. Out West we operate under a basic social contract: if you're going to serve something that tastes like a mistake, you bury it in salsa. Accountability through condiment. These people plated the crime, handed it over, and walked back into the kitchen without so much as an apology. I ate it anyway because the alternative was starvation and I had places to be and I was not going to let a hotel egg defeat me on day two.

Back on the road. New England trees hit different the first few hundred of them, a genuine sensory adjustment after a lifetime of screaming through the brown infinity of I-5. By tree five thousand the novelty had fully expired and you find yourself volunteering, internally, to burn every last one of them if it would get you somewhere faster. A Dunkin in New Hampshire administered the necessary caffeine and restored a thin margin of patience. Onward.

The Alchemist materialized right at opening. There were photos taken for the gram. This is not up for debate, some pilgrimages require documentation. A hand-pulled Heady Topper was the obvious and correct first move, because you don't drive to Stowe and order something you could have found at home. Merch was acquired. Cans were acquired. The countryside opened back up around you on the way out, that specific Vermont pastoral that makes you briefly forget you are a functional adult who is here, specifically, to go to breweries, and not for skiing, camping, or socialism, which are the other acceptable Vermont reasons.

Hill Farmstead in the afternoon. Everything that's been written about it is true and also insufficient. The road in removes you from the world incrementally, cell service bleeding out mile by mile until you arrive with no bars and no particular desire to find any. Do yourself a favor and leave the wifi alone. There is something profound about sitting with a saison in a place where no one can reach you, and that profundity is worth more than anything waiting in your notifications.

I ran into friends. Three of them, through three entirely separate beer circles, through three different sequences of life events that had no reasonable business converging on the same Vermont hillside on the same afternoon. Beer Twitter, beer clubs, Untappd, whatever the taxonomy was, the world turned out to be small and the overlap real. We sat with it for a while. Some things don't need explaining.

Back to the hotel for a few hours. Merch assessed, bottles arranged with care.

Then Lawson's, which had been a conditional item on the itinerary contingent on Uber's rural Vermont presence, which I had correctly suspected was uncertain. Strangely, immediately, one appeared. The math worked. Several pints of Sip of Sunshine varieties, food, good people doing what good people do in a taproom at the end of a long beer day. Merch acquired. Then the return trip.

Uber did not exist in rural Vermont anymore. This was established definitively, across multiple apps, over a stretch of time that felt longer than it was because the math on walking 13 miles was already forming in the back of my head and it was not a crazy enough idea, which was itself a sign that the evening had progressed past rational thresholds.

One of the bartenders intervened. The offer was a 15-mile drive, no gas money, non-negotiable on both counts, and there was a reason. Years back, stranded in a Paris Metro station, card declined, the machine to reload it broken, CDG and a flight home on the other side of a gate that wasn't going to open itself. The options under consideration ranged from jumping the turnstile to a full jailbreak scenario. Then a stranger, not a word of English between them, walked up to the machine, fed in fifteen euros, and was gone before a proper thank you could land. Refused repayment entirely. Just gone.

So no gas money, and one condition: pass it on when the moment comes. I agreed to both, got in the car, and Vermont moved past the windows for fifteen miles while I sat with the specific feeling of being on the right end of a story someone else started.

They dropped me at the Prohibition Pig, which is where you go in Waterbury when it's late and your options have narrowed. If you know, you know. I walked in and found the same friends from Hill Farmstead, who had just navigated their own version of the same Uber problem through what I can only assume was a similarly unlikely chain of events. The universe was batting a thousand that night. Nobody walked 10 miles in the dark. We had a drink.

All 50 Progress after Day 2:



TL;DR

The Alchemist — Hand-pulled Heady is the move, full stop. Beautiful property, excellent beer, go at opening.

Hill Farmstead — Give yourself a few hours and surrender the phone. Saison, picnic, maybe a nap. The road in is part of it.

Lawson's — Great beer, good food, greater people. Just solve your return trip before you need it.

Prohibition Pig — Worth it if you're staying in Waterbury. Not a destination, but the right place to end up when everything else is closed and you've had a day.

 

Part 1 and Part 2 excellent information, I’ve been to many states but not the NE states .

 

New England Tour (Part 3) Waterbury, VT → Burlington, VT → Waterbury, VT

The Fairfield breakfast was not even considered. Whatever those eggs had done to me on day two had been logged, categorized, and filed under unforgivable. Burlington was forty minutes north and Burlington, I had decided, was a city with higher standards and something worth eating in it.

The rain had moved in overnight, the casual Vermont kind, not committing to anything, just present enough to keep you honest. Off and on sprinkles, the sky doing exactly what it wanted and not consulting anyone about it.

What Burlington had not mentioned in any of the materials I reviewed was the marathon. Twenty-six point two miles of volunteers in the rain, grinding out something that science has repeatedly suggested the human body was not designed for, with the grim determination of people who have told too many people about their training schedule to quit now. I watched them from the sidewalk with the complicated respect of a man who runs voluntarily but has also just driven to Vermont specifically to drink beer. We are all mad in our own way. At least mine is warm.

Parked miles away up a hill because the marathon had colonized every reasonable block of downtown. My own legs were about to earn their keep.

Henry's Diner first. One hundred years in operation, which means it has survived two world wars, a depression, several recessions, and generations of Vermonters with opinions about eggs. The plate arrived as it has presumably always arrived: meat, egg, Vermont cheddar, grease, no apologies and no amendments required. Something about the combination and the formica and the way the light came through the window triggered a neurological event and I was briefly, genuinely, in 1937. Swing music rising in my head. The woman at the counter asked how my weekend was going and I was a half second from telling her golly gee I'm about to take my finest dame out to the dance oh boy, before I caught myself and said fine, thanks, great eggs.

Foam Brewing had promised a 10am opening on their website, which is the kind of ambitious scheduling that deserves respect in this industry. The marathon pushed them to 11, which was reasonable and also meant that by the time those doors swung open, the crowd that had assembled outside was operating at a frequency that would have concerned Wade Boggs. I posted up at the bar for an hour. Two hazy IPAs, both excellent, the kind that make you understand why people will stand in the rain waiting for a brewery to open on a Sunday morning. No notes. Legitimate operation.

Back into the city. Burlington rewards the walk. The world's tallest filing cabinet presides over a parking lot on Flynn Avenue, forty feet of actual filing cabinets welded into a column by a man named Bren Alvarez who apparently spent 38 years accumulating bureaucratic paperwork for a highway project that never got built and decided that art was the appropriate response. Each drawer represents a year of waiting. Birds nest in the upper ones. The whole thing is covered in stickers and rust and has the energy of a monument to something that nobody fully agrees on, which makes it the most honest piece of public sculpture I have ever encountered.

The rest of the afternoon was a rhythm. Car. Tourism. Burlington Beer Co for lunch and a flight, solid food and a lineup that doesn't need to apologize for anything. Zero Gravity, Queen City, Switchback hit for cans in the efficient manner of a man with a suitcase and a purpose. Tourism. Dodge a runner. Car. Tourism. The marathon runners were still out there doing their thing in the drizzle, which at this point in the day had crossed from admirable into genuinely unsettling.

Fiddlehead on the way back south, a quick stop for cans and nothing more because Waterbury was waiting and the evening had plans.

Freak Folk in Waterbury, which deserves the visit but requires advance intelligence. The sinus-destroyer IPA they were pouring was the kind of beer that hits the bridge of your nose like a structural event, aggressively, joyfully, with zero concern for your well-being. If that is your frequency, you will be very happy. If it is not, the mixed fermentation offerings are where the nuance lives, funky and alive and genuinely interesting. Know thyself before you order.

The night ended at the Reservoir. Cheesesteak and mac because the body had earned something real, and a Heady Topper to close the loop on Vermont properly. The Reservoir is the kind of place that doesn't announce itself and doesn't need to. Excellent food, great beer menu, full of people who live there and know something you don't yet. Underrated in every direction.

TL;DR

Foam — Legit excellent hazies. Cool spot. Get there at opening if the marathon hasn't eaten the schedule.

Burlington — Walkable, weird, worth it. The filing cabinet alone justifies the tourism portion of the day.

Burlington Beer Co. — Good food, solid lineup. Dependable anchor for the lunch hour.

Freak Folk — More cutting edge than most of Waterbury will prepare you for. Go for the mixed ferm if the sinus-blaster IPAs aren't your operating frequency. Go for both if they are.

The Reservoir — Excellent food, great beer menu. Underrated. Hit it.

 

@bambiere you may need to start a thread for new members on how you can come on strong and still be liked.. You've been here less than a year, post prolifically, with bold opinions, and yet less than 1/6 of the folks voting think you're a wanker.