2015 BEER DISCOVERY TOUR: The Saint Louis Brewery, Schlafly Bottleworks, St. Louis, MO (June 29, Brewery Stop #14)

2015 BEER DISCOVERY TOUR: The Saint Louis Brewery, Schlafly Bottleworks, St. Louis, MO (June 29, Brewery Stop #14) The 14th brewery that we visited on the cross-country beer discovery tour (click to read about the whole trip) was Schlafly Bottleworks in St. Louis MO. After a great KC BBQ lunch, we hit the road and headed to St. Louis. There was a little bit of traffic out of KC, and a whole bunch of traffic trying to get into St. Louis which pushed out travel time to over 5hrs. We ended up getting off the freeway and taking some side-roads into the SW part of town as their rush hour freeway traffic is horrible. The Schlafly Bottleworks location isn’t hard to find, just be ready to drive a bit through residential areas to get there. Note, that there are two locations, we went to the production facility to meet up with one of Gary’s former students that lives in the area in the suburbs and not the main downtown restaurant and bar. I had never heard of Schlafly before our trip, it was selected by Devin and I’m glad he picked it out for us to stop at. They have …

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2015 BEER DISCOVERY TOUR: Boulevard Brewing Company, Kansas City, MO (June 29, Brewery Stop #13)

2015 BEER DISCOVERY TOUR: Boulevard Brewing Company, Kansas City, MO (June 29, Brewery Stop #13) The 13th brewery visited on our cross-country beer discovery tour (click to read about the whole trip) was Boulevard Brewing Company in Kansas City MO. This well known brewery is one of the oldest and largest micro-breweries in the mid-west and we were really looking forward to visiting the location. We left Lincoln on Sunday morning and headded south to KC. The trip wasn’t too bad, just about three hours with a bit of traffic and construction detours in KC itself. We timed it just right and got there as they opened on Monday before lunch. The brewery complex is located just south-west of the KC MO downtown area and is quite large as you can see. The main facility has a small-ish taproom next to their swag/sales area that has both stuff with their logo on it, lots of bottles, growlers, hats, local goods, t-shirts, etc. for sale. The taproom has 10 or so tables and a bar you can stand at. Typically people use this area for pre-post brewery tour sampling as it turns out, but we just wanted to do the tasting. …

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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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