Please pass the discount chocolate hearts.
A few days before Valentine’s Day I went to Target to stock up on heart-shaped chocolate edibles that are my reason for the season, plus some stretchy, comfy pants to wear while eating. Much to my surprise, all the heart-shaped everythings were half-off and, instead of comfy pants, a jungle of bikinis greeted me in the lady’s department. I had forgotten that department stores operate on a retail version of “bar time,” and it was closing hour for winter.
While I try to spend as little of my existence on earth thinking about, purchasing, or wearing bikinis, the tiny, brightly colored scraps of fabric did remind me of summer, vacations, and then drinking good beer while on vacation. It’s one of my most favorite things to do.
There are two widely agreed upon types of vacations: the one in which you schedule every minute of your allotted time to fit in as much sightseeing as humanly possible; and the one in which you relax for every minute of your allotted time or until your brain attains the consistency of flan. There is no such complexity in beer-focused vacations.
Flan. Ask the PK|BFers how to make it.
Of course, this is not to be taken the wrong way: I do not advocate scheduling as much beer-drinking into every minute of your allotted time that your brain attains the consistency of custard-like desserts. Rather, for beer-focused vacations, the ultimate goal is always testing as many breweries as possible while maintaining one’s faculties enough to get home safely. This gives you several vacation options: a beer fest, a beer-friendly city/area, or bringing along a designated driver who won’t grow so weary of your intoxicated antics that she abandons you at a rest stop.
The sheer volume of beer fests in the states is cheers-worthy. They exist for every region, season, style, strength, bottle color, etc. Odds are that, thanks to the Google, you won’t have trouble finding one near you or somewhere you want to visit. There’s nothing quite like being around hundreds of other beer enthusiasts, wearing their best beer-themed Ts, all quite friendly, considerate, and equally hammered.
The great thing about beer fests is that you would never be able to sample beers from so many different brewers in a short time otherwise. The bad thing about beer fests is that exiting the festival represents the end stop of your day. Pro tip: allot time for a disco nap before dinner and a handful of ibuprofens with appetizers.
Visiting a beer-friendly area might be your option if you have more time to wander and dawdle. Pick a locale known for its breweries, park for a day, and get to it. Portland, Boulder, Cinci, etc. My family and I recently visited Ann Arbor, Michigan, which has numerous brewpubs within walking distance of each other. I’d say staggering distance, but for the most part we held our shit together, even in the brewery that catered to college students who looked like goddamned children. It was my father’s 65th birthday, but I was the one who started making old man air swats and mumbling about kids these days.
When you explore the brewpubs of a particular town, you end up learning a lot about it. More, I would argue, than visiting museums and historical markers will tell you. Part of this is due to the increased level of chattiness you’ll find at any bar, but it’s also in the choice of music, the decor, the the names of the beers, the amount of innovation with style, the creative facial hair of the brewers, the graffiti in the bathrooms. It lets you in on how a town acts when no one else is looking.
The last and most unlikely of happy vacation scenarios is that you have a personal chauffeur. Cabs are fine, but you don’t have to pretend to be sober enough to know the name of your hotel with family.
My husband and I have benefited most richly from having a mother/-in-law that doesn’t drink, yet still agrees to driving our drunk-asses around on beery family vacations. My dad in the backseat, commenting too-loudly about people in the car next to us, my husband giggling helplessly, me trying to tell a story whose point I lost three stoplights ago. But this is, after all, the same woman who went bikini shopping with me throughout most of my teens and 20s, and never once suggested she maybe needed a drink.