Session 93 - Of Trips and Travels

One of my rare incursions into the world of The Session today, this month hosted by The Roaming Pint, on the theme of beer tourism.

If you take a quick look at my label list, down there to the bottom of this page, you'll notice that 'trips' is the 7th most commonly used on Fuggled, totalling 52 posts, well 53 now I guess. It would therefore be thoroughly reasonable to assume that I go on plenty of 'beer trips'. However, looks can be deceiving, and deceived you would be if you thought that beer trips were something I engage in regularly. I simply do not travel for beer. Heck, I don't even go pubs in Charlottesville just because they happen to have the latest, greatest, imperial black IPA randalised on gorilla snot.

A dig into those other 52 posts would reveal stories about the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, parts of the Czech Republic, and other places that escape my recall at the moment. Practically none of those trips were taken with beer as the driving factor.

Mrs V and I went to Ireland in 2008 because I had always wanted to visit the country, and Mrs V is good friends with Tale of the Ale Reuben's wife (this trip was in his pre-Tale days). We drank excellent beers, in excellent pubs, but beer wasn't the aim of the trip. There are still some of my friends who find it inconceivable that we didn't go to St James' Gate while in Dublin.

When Mrs V and I travel it is to discover a place, and yes that often involves pubs and beer, but they are not the focus. I can't think of any brewery I am interested in visiting, when you work in one and give tours of the stainless steel, you get to point where a mash tun is a mash tun, and a kettle a kettle. Meeting the people that make the beer is a different question altogether, I would love to meet the guys at Kout for example.

Next year Mrs V and I are hoping to get to Prague for the Christmas holidays, which nicely coincides with my turning some daft age. I look forward to sitting around tables in pubs with my friends, the likes of Evan, Max, and Rob, and drinking lots of good local beer. But one thing that will be very unlikely is my having a session on a Czech made American style IPA, simply because I can have that style of beer any time I want, and what is the point of travelling across the globe to drink the stuff I can find in my own back yard? One thing for sure though, that first mouthful of proper Czech pale lager will be worth the cost of the air tickets alone.

Travel for beer? Nah, never going to happen. Enjoying local beer on my travels, yup, all the time.