Jen’s “Best Of” Journal – May 2, 2020

Day 308: Bokeelia, FL

Sunny and pleasant.

We are running out of time on our trip, and I have been spending a lot of time in review during our seclusion in Bokeelia. A “Best/Worst Of” discussion follows. Today, we are focusing on the breweries that we visited on our trip.

Best of the Trip: Breweries

We visited 50 breweries on our road trip. If we had road tripped just to visit breweries, we could have visited 5000!

Tom’s cousin Kay in Bend, OR provided us with a brewery passport, the Bend Ale Trail, which lists 18 breweries that you can visit and get a stamp. And Bend has even more than 18 breweries! We visited six.

Equally accommodating, Kay’s sister Maggie took us to five breweries in the San Diego area.

Why do we like breweries? They often have pretty good food at a reasonable price. Service is usually quick. Normally we sit at the bar and chat with the locals and learn about the area. There is something relaxing about sitting in a brewery. And we like beer.

Best beer:  Spoetzl Brewery, Shiner, TX  We loved every beer on tap.

Brewery with best food:  49th State Brewery, Healy, AK

Brewery with overnight parking:  Abita Brewing Company, Covington, LA

Other notable breweries:

• Yukon Brewing, Whitehorse, YT – great spruce tip pale ale, and the bartender brought us kettle corn!

• Matanuska Brewing, Anchorage, AK – bartender asked us for a postcard from a random place we would visit

• Kodiak Island Brewing – we made lots of friends, and they had a great gose (sour)

• Great Northern Brewing, Whitefish, MT – great wild huckleberry lager

• MickDuff’s Brewing, Sandpoint, ID – had great food

• Sunriver Brewing, Bend, OR – good chocolate beers

• Misty Mountain, Brookings, OR – Lord of the Rings theme

• Rickety Creek, Kingman, AZ – amazing white chocolate beer, good food, and we saw them making their own pasta for the dinner hour on our way out

• Barrio Brewing, Tuscon, AZ – loved the beer and the lunch at this place

• New Braunfels Brewing, TX – all sours, including one made with pickle juice called PKL FKR. This is where “Worst Of” comes in!

• Jester King, Austin, TX – a farm setting, this place had wild beers and a way-out environmental philosophy