Microbrewed Adventures - Charles Papazian [47]
Day 5: Leaving Chicago on Friday, we stop at Beer Gear Homebrew Supply Shop on our way out of the suburbs and then visit the Flossmoor Station Brewpub, where several more homebrewers are awaiting a luncheon. Onward we drive to Lafayette, Indiana, where the Tippecanoe Homebrew Club is hosting an evening at the Lafayette Brewing Company. We have dinner, talks, beer and good times with more than 40 area homebrewers, some whom I knew when they joined the American Homebrewers Association in 1980.
Day 6: The Great Fermentations of Indianapolis homebrew shop is our next stop, with lunch across the street at the Broad Ripple Brewpub. In the evening we join area homebrewers at the Ram Brewery in downtown Indianapolis to enjoy award-winning beer and dinner extraordinaire.
Day 7 and 8: On our final days we cruise to Cleveland, where we rendezvous at the Association of Brewers’ annual Craft Brewers Conference. There’s dinner with local club members at the Great Lakes Brewpub and another evening event at their brewery tasting room to speak to 200 homebrew and microbrew enthusiasts. Beer maven Michael Jackson and I tell stories of beer digressions and the experiences that brought us to Cleveland.
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MICKVIRAY PAPAZIAN PILSENER
A cause for celebration Mick, Vi and Ray shared with me their beer and their recipe for their commemorative “Charlie on the Road” pilsener. These folks are award-winning champion homebrewers with a knack for brewing up the perfect beer every time. This is a classic all-malt Czech-style pilsener lager hopped exclusively with Saaz hops—the way it used to be in the Czech Republic. It’s clean, crisp, malty and refreshing, with an aftertaste that entices your very soul to have another and another. This recipe can be found in About the Recipes.
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Eight days of beer, beer and more beer. Sandra and I are tired, yet strangely energized from our experience and the endless welcomes across the prairies and rolling hills between Fargo and Cleveland. Homebrewing and microbrewing has indeed woven itself into the fabric of a quality lifestyle for the thousands of people we met on our journeys.
Completely Joyous Tour
Tennessee, Alabama and Arkansas
WHILE EACH OF THESE short stories offers you a taste of one of my adventures, words can never express the delights of every beer, every homebrewer and every unexpected brewing encounter. Four and a half days seems like an eternity when you are on the road tasting all those beers, searching for the ones that scream “ultimate.” The 14 stops on this trip really don’t signify an end or a beginning. The beer just flows into one continuous beer experience when your mission is beer in America.
We visited eight different breweries on this southern sojourn but as I said, we never seemed to really stop as we tasted our way through 32 microbrewed beers. And in between this continuous flow we squeezed in visits to two homebrew shops and five homebrew clubs, tasting more than 130 different homebrewed ales, lagers and meads.
Sleep? What was that, we often wondered? We knew it was precious, for there was very little of it. We were compensated for lack of sleep by the quality of beers all along the way. With 300 people visited and three states, four cities and 525 miles driven, we all felt the experience was priceless.
Day 1: Our trip begins as the “Completely Joyous” Association of Brewers On-the-Road expedition in Nashville, Tennessee, where we visit Boscos Restaurant and Brewery, Blackstone Restaurant and Brewery, Bohannon Brewing Company and All Seasons Gardening & Brewing Supply. Great places, great food, great people, great microbrew and great homebrew in April 2003.
Day 2: From Nashville, we continue on, driving to rendezvous with the Rocket City Homebrewers and Birmingham Masterbrewers in Huntsville, Alabama. Our traveling entourage, my wife Sandra (who brewed her first homebrew, a Belgian Witbier, two weeks earlier), Boscos Nashville brewmaster