Brewery Tours

With December approaching we decided to combine a trip to one of Germany's famous Christmas Market cities that is also famous for being the home of a beer style called Altbier.

Following on from our visit to Bamberg we traveled by train onto the city of Heidelberg which is famous for its highly respected university and impressive schloss (castle). Additionally the city has a few breweries in the altstadt (old town).

During a three month stay in The Netherlands we took a trip via train to the city of Bamberg which is situated in the north of Bavaria, Germany. The main purpose was to seek out a style of beer called Rauchbier which is a German smoked beer and Bamberg is well renowned for having a number of breweries specializing in these.

On a recent trip to New Jersey and New York City we visited World of Beer, Harvest Moon Brewery, Paulaner NYC, Belgian Beer Cafe, and Heartland Brewery to see what the State of NJ and NYC had to offer in craft beer.

In Belgium, beer is without a doubt a culture. Brewing dates back to the 12th century, when the Catholic Church started brewing in their abbeys and sold it as a funding method. Beer started to get in to people’s daily life when they saw it as a perfect alternative to the dirty Medieval water they had to drink and that made them sick. It’s really hard to comprehend how many types of different Belgian beers there are on the market now – but estimates vary from 800 to 1800. So if you are a true beer lover, isn’t it time to travel to the country where it is a religion itself?

In brewing terms St. Louis in Missouri is best known for Anheuser-Busch but we also wanted to find out what the Craft Beer scene was like in the gateway to the west.

I recently returned from a trip to British Columbia, which is the most westerly Province in Canada. For this visit I was curious how the craft beer scene would compare to that in the USA and also whether it would be heavily influenced by the West Coast hop-forward styles of Oregon and Washington State.

Even though I am a frequent visitor to Cleveland I had not yet visited this distillery and craft brewery so thought it was about time to check out Portside Distillery.

With snow and frigid weather still hammering the northeast of the USA we had to make a trip down to the Pennsylvania State Capital of Harrisburg so whilst there we decided it was also a good time to visit a couple of local breweries namely Lancaster Brewing and Pizza Boy Brewing.

On a winter's day in north-western Pennsylvania we braved the cold and snow to visit Voodoo Brewing located in the small town of Meadville, the home town of actress Sharon Stone no less!