2015 BEER DISCOVERY TOUR: The Church Brew Works, Pittsburgh, PA (June 30, Brewery Stop #16)

2015 BEER DISCOVERY TOUR: The Church Brew Works, Pittsburgh, PA (June 30, Brewery Stop #16) The 16th brewery visited on our cross-country beer discovery tour (click to read about the whole trip) was The Church Brew Works in Pittsburgh PA. After enjoying a wide range of great beers at East End, we stopped on our way to The Church at Caliente Pizza & Draft House for a few pints of local brews, as this was one of our hosts favorite bars/restaurants. I was pleasantly surprised at the variety of beers available at Caliente and the servers were really helpful in describing them and making recommendations. As it was quickly approaching dinner time so we finished up our pints and migrated to The Church, which was just a few minutes away by car. The neighborhoods we traveled through were really cool, historic, and obviously in the ‘up-in-coming’ category as one might say. I was sort of surprised that a brewery would be allowed to purchase and occupy a church, but it’s really there and quite awesome. Rusty shared with us that this is the only one in town, as the city caught a large backlash against churches being sold to private …

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2015 BEER DISCOVERY TOUR, Portland OR to Portland ME and back… 24 June-9 July, 2015

2015 BEER DISCOVERY TOUR, Portland OR to Portland ME and back…7800 miles later… From late June to early July 2015 I was lucky enough to go on a cross country road trip with Gary and our nephew Devin. We drove my car from Portland Oregon to Portland Maine in just about three weeks. We took a ‘central US’ path East and came back taking a more northern passage. Regarding where we went each day, we made it to about 40 breweries and a handful of tap-houses, bars, and brewpubs to find local beers and food along the way. While the long distance driving was challenging some days (10+ hrs at a time), we really enjoyed the trip with it’s the ever-changing scenery and wonderful cities, towns, and people we met. Before leaving on the trip, we gathered and then took a couple of cases of local specialty beers for our friend Rusty in Pittsburgh. The sucky part was that while we wanted the beers to not get ruined by the heat, we ended up unloading and reloading it a LOT as we stopped each night. This is a valuable learning experience, to stick to mailing stuff like beer and wine, …

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