When we set out to do our Beer Traveler issue, we wanted to include and popular feature from one of our earlier issues: The perfect place to have a beer.
More beer city outtakes from our recently published Beer Traveler.
Montreal is the second largest city in Canada and also the second largest city of French speakers. Only Paris has more people who speak French. It is also home to nearly twenty breweries within the city limits and several more just outside.
Some of the best include Dieu du Ciel, Le Chaval Blanc and Le Saint-Bock Brasserie. A few others worth your time are Brutopia, any of the four Les 3 Brasseurs or the Benelux Brewpub. If you can get out of town, Unibroue on the Chambly River has a fun tour.
If you’re hungry or looking for a good beer bar, try Fourquet Fourchette, Vices et Versa or Broue Pub Brouhaha. If you want to bring some beer home with you, your best best bet is Depanneur Peluso.
In some ways, Montreal is two cities. There’s an underground city there with tunnels spanning 20 miles connecting 80 percent of the city’s downtown office space and 35 percent of all commercial space. It also connects 60 residential complexes, meaning you could conceivably never go outside, especially during a harsh winter, for weeks at a time, yet still eat and rink beer at some of the finest places in town. Each day, about half a million people use one of the 120 entrances and exits to the underground.
When the weather is nice, Mount Royal is a great place to go. Created by Frederick Law Olmstead, who is most famous for creating NYC’s Central Park, it offers the most amazing views of the city. Nearby is St. Joseph’s Oratory, the largest church in Canada and boasting the biggest dome of any kind after the one in the Vatican.
For other non-beer things to do, there’s the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Olympics Stadium – the site of the 1976 summer games.
If you can choose when to visit Quebec, June is a good time because that’s when Montreal’s best beer festival is held. The Mondial de la Biere lasts five days and includes many special events in addition to the festival itself.
We continue to feature profiles of beer towns that didn’t make it into our Beer Traveler issue.
While St. Louis has arguably slipped in its influence, both beerwise and otherwise, the history of Anheuser-Busch still makes it a destination for beer lovers. A century ago, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in the country, which is when it acquired its nickname as the “Gateway to the West,” but today it is not even in the top fifty.
History alone makes a trip to visit the original Anheuser-Busch brewery de rigueur. But you’ll also want to visit one of Schlafly Brewery’s two locations, and not because they bill themselves as St. Louis’ second-largest brewery. Other breweries include The Stable, Square One Brewery and Mattingly Brewing. Outside the city limits, check out the O’Fallon Brewery.
For beer bars in the city, there’s the 33 Wine Shop & Tasting Bar, Iron Barley and Bailey’s Chocolate Bar. In the area, there’s also the International Tap House in Chesterfield and the Wine and Cheese Place if you’re shopping for bottles.
At the end of April is the best time to visit, at least for beer, because that’s when the city puts on its own St. Louis Beer Week.
Beyond beer, for art visit the St. Louis Art Museum and Forest Park, which was built for the 1904 World’s Fair. The Gateway Arch is hard to miss, but there’s also the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis and the St. Louis Union Station. While not strictly a non-beer destination, the Lemp Mansion is open to tourists, and several ghosts are reputed to haunt the home. The mansion was owned by the family that ran the Lemp Brewery, which in 1870, was the largest brewery in St. Louis.
We will continue to run profiles of beer towns throughout the month pulled from the the cutting room floor of our Beer Traveler issue.
“Keep Austin Weird” is Austin’s unofficial motto, and it fits with the Texas capitol’s status as an oasis for artists, musicians, liberals and even brewers. In and around town, there are seven breweries, and while Austin is the fourth largest city in Texas, it still feels small. And geographically, it is relatively small, meaning you can visit them all. There’s the Draught House, Independence Brewing, Live Oak Brewing, Lovejoy’s North by Northwest, Uncle Billy’s Brew & Que and the new (512) Brewing, a nod to the town’s telephone area code. There is a rumor of a forthcoming beer week being planned, but a time and date has not been announced yet.
Music is a big part of Austin, which bills itself as the “Live Music Capitol of the World,” due to having more music venues per capita than any other U.S. city. A stroll down 6th Street reveals music of all kinds wafting out of endless clubs and bars. Some of the best beer bars to check out are the Ginger Man, Billy’s on Burnet, the Elephant Room, Opal’s Divine and Zax Pints and Plates. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to pick up something for the road, the Grapevine Market or Spec’s will have what you’re looking for with great selections.
If you’re hungry, there are plenty of barbeque joints to fill you up. Stubb’s Bar-B-Q or Iron Works on River Street downtown popular destinations.
Beyond beer, there’s a lot of do in Austin, from ambling around the quirky shopping district to watching the bats under the Congress Avenue Bridge, which boasts the largest urban population of Mexican Free-Tailed Bats. Every night around sunset, 1.5 million bats fly out in search of food; there vast numbers even show up on the local radar. For indoor activities try the Blanton Museum of Art, the O. Henry Museum or the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture.
Where is the most unexpected place you have enjoyed a cold one?
All of us have experienced that moment when you could really use a beer, but you know the chances of finding a good beer—or even any beer at all—are slim to none. That’s when, if everything is right with the world, the Beer Gods take pity on our thirst and deliver an unexpected treat. Read More…
Belgium has long been a serious beer drinker’s destination, and when combined with great foods, a week’s trip is a delight. The entire country—Wallonia in the south and Flanders in the north—is chock-full of great breweries and restaurants. That’s too much to tackle in one week so we focused on Flanders—with a visit to the capitol, Brussels, which straddles the north-south political, social and psychological divide of the country. Read More…
Italy is wine country. Vino is available everywhere. Shops labeled ‘Enoteca’ specialize in offering customers a wide selection of wines. So visitors to Italy might be surprised, while perusing the bottles at a local enoteca, to stumble upon a few elegant and distinctive 750ml bottle labeled birra (beer). In fact, over the past five years, the craft beer movement in Italy has grown rapidly and local beers are starting to take their place alongside the best wines in the country.
Set in the lush valley of the Swabian mountains, Stuttgart advertises itself as “the new heart of Europe,” proudly high tech and industrial. Tourist brochures promote mineral spring spas, the arts and that 500 vineyards cover the nearby hillsides. But look under the hood and, as in much of Germany, beer remains an integral part of everyday life.
When most people today think about New Zealand, beer is probably not the number one image conjured up. Instead, the Lord of the Rings film trilogy probably springs first to mind, and they did wonderfully showcase the island nation’s wide and varied landscapes and unique native flora and fauna. In the years following the release of the Tolkien films (2001-3), New Zealand tourism more than doubled, and it shows no signs of slowing down. More people visiting also means more demand for local beer, which in turn can only help New Zealand’s craft beer renaissance.
Americans who are told that Fosters is “Australian for beer” may scratch their heads with confusion when they land on our shores expecting to be greeted with barbequed shrimp and “Australia’s beer.” They would be hard-pressed to find the blue, white and gold label during their visit Downunder and they definitely won’t find the famous oil cans.
