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Monday
January 29th
Austin, Texas
Iris and I spent Sunday at Chip’s home up in Cedar Park. His wife Suzie served us brunch and dinner, and in between we played with their kids, Tiger and Maggie. After spending the past two months in breweries, restaurants, and our trailer, it was nice to be in a home. But as Iris’s luck would have it, the Dig, a new beer bar, had opened up down the street, so we (I) decided to check it out.
Cedar Park is a fairly small town, and somewhat out of the way, so I wasn’t expecting much, especially when we pulled up to a small strip mall. But as I walked to the door, I could see over twenty taps sticking out of the wall. Was that a Stone handle? Actually it was two, just down the way from a pair of Rogues. The lineup also featured Dogfish 90 Minute, as well as some of the more adventurous styles from the Texas breweries, including a double ESB, from Real Brewing. There wasn’t an easy beer on the wall.
The interior had a coffee house feel to it. Clean and simple. The taps were the focus. The bottle list was small, but included some Avery. There were wines too, and grilled sandwiches. Todd Wink (where do people get these names?), the owner, was behind the bar. An avid home brewer, he had recently left his job to follow his dream of owning a beer bar. He had opened the Dig with his wife, and both of them were doing everything - pouring beers, making sandwiches. They’re both amateur archeologists, which is where the name came from.
The next day, our last in Austin, we visited Billy’s Brew and Cue, a relatively new brewpub in South Austin. The owners know the food and beverage business, having founded a successful chain of local coffee houses, one of which was next door. Billy’s was more polished than I expected. A barbecue joint (that’s what the “Cue” stands for), I was ready for something more down home. Iris and I pulled up to the bar, excited about having our first Texas brisket. In the dining room behind us, the brewer, Brian Peters, was giving the staff a beer tasting, bringing them up to date on his latest concoctions. According to the GM, he does this a lot.
The brisket practically melted in our mouths. The pork ribs, done with a dry rub, were great too. The beers were all well made, but not very adventurous.
In the end, that’s how I would sum up the Austin beer scene: it’s growing, the local beers are of very high quality, and there are a lot of great places to drink them, but for a city that touts itself as being weird and alternative, the craft beer scene is still somewhat conservative. As I said, though, all the pieces are in place, and I got the feeling Austin was ready to explode.
The craft beer scene, like everything else, will soon be big in Texas.
Saturday
January 27th
Austin, Texas
The next morning I was still feeling the effects of boys night out. Iris and I were in the mood for brunch, so we headed to North by Northwest, a high end brewpub. We had already stopped by on Tuesday, our first night in Austin, when the place was packed, with the wait for a table well over an hour. We eventually snagged two seats at the bar that night, and the brewer’s reserve, a bourbon aged stout, was worth the trip alone, though each of the beers had been blessed with distinctive flavors. The brewing system, under glass behind the bar, was top of the line, and large enough for a microbrewery. The food was fancy and a little too rich for me, but everyone around us seemed to love it. In the end, we had enjoyed North by Northwest so much we had vowed to return, if only to take some pictures when it wasn’t so jammed.
We arrived just as it was opening, and if anything, North by Northwest is even more beautiful in the light of day. The design is reminiscent of an exclusive hunting lodge, with soaring walls composed of stone and wood. Despite its cathedral-like size, the oversized rooms still feel comfortable, partly because the owners have thought of, and spent money on, every detail. I got the feeling North by Northwest was built during the owner’s mid-life crisis. He could have bought a Porsche, but instead built a multi-million dollar monument to Sir Edmund Hillary and Teddy Roosevelt. There are blown up photos of famous explorers all over the place, as well as some posters of the Hitchcock movie that bears the same name. But exploring is obviously the them here. The reasonable prices include round trip transportation to a bygone era. From the moment I passed through the twenty foot door, I felt like bwana.
The brunch was good. I had the breakfast pizza, with egg on it, a good combination. Iris loved her omelette, and ate the whole thing, something she rarely does. Of all the brewpubs we’ve been to, this was one of the nicest, and is a must if you’re visiting Austin.
That night, Chip got us tickets to the Texas - Texas Tech basketball game. Actually he arranged television passes for us, so we got to hang out in the media room before the game. Our seats were just off the court, right behind all the print reporters, including Chip. Darryl Royal, a former football coach at Texas, and something of a legend in these parts, sat right in front of me. During the game, I watched as various dignitaries came over to shake his eighty year old hand. Lance Armstrong was also there, as well as Mack Brown, the current football coach.
They had come to see the real star of the evening, Bobby Knight. Though the Texas team was ranked 12th in the country, all eyes were on the coach from Texas Tech. At this point, I think most people are drawn to Knight’s games hoping he’ll strangle a ref. He doesn’t get the players he had at Indiana, and most coaches have figured out how to stop his motion offense, so it isn’t really about the basketball any more. Bobby’s a celebrity more than anything, and an incident waiting to happen.
The game was awful. Tech couldn’t shoot, and they infected the Texas players. Luckily, Bobby spent most of the game screaming, so we had something to watch besides the band and the Texas dancers. During the second half, Texas started hitting, and Bobby’s anger lost some of its steam.
When the rout was over, Iris and I went back to the media room for the press conference. Bobby entered and the whole room tensed up. Bobby seemed worn out from the losing. He was very polite, thanking the Texas fans for the pre-game ovation, honoring his recently becoming the winningest coach in college basketball history. He mentioning how much he respected Darryl Royal, Mack Brown, and Rick Barns, the Texas basketball coach. Everything went well until my cousin Chip asked Knight why had lost to Barns three times in a row, by an average of almost 30 points.
Knight bristled. He seemed to think Chip was implying Barns was now the better coach, or had Knight’s number. Chip was of course. After a brief flare-up, Knight deflected the question onto safer ground, then got up and left.
We followed him. With Knight gone, the show was over.
Friday
January 26
Austin, Texas
Friday was boys night out with my cousin Chip. He lives in Austin, covering University of Texas sports for the Dallas Morning News. He also hosts a daily radio show on ESPN, which I was listening to as I drove downtown to Lovejoy’s Taproom. It was 4:30 p.m. and Chip wouldn’t be finished for another three hours, but I wanted to check out Austin’s downtown scene and this was my one night to do it.
I had been told Lovejoy’s, one of the few punk rock brewpubs around, was worth a visit. Iris and I had stopped by on Wednesday, but they were closed for “maintenance and cleaning.” I’m not sure what they accomplished in that single day, as I walked into one of the grungiest bars I’ve seen in a while. The friends I made in Tampa, in town for a Gourd’s concert, were already there when I arrived, including Johnny V, owner of the Independent in St. Pete, his wife Veronica, Mike Vouch of Micro Man Distributors and his wife Popey, as well as Tom.
Lovejoy’s was dark and spare, with furniture that appeared to have been smashed to pieces and then reassembled, some more than once. I found myself not wanting to touch anything for too long, afraid I might get stuck to it. In other words, it looked and smelled the way a punk bar should. A lot of people were smoking, illegal in Texas, though no one seemed too worried about it. It was a bastion of anarchy after all. As a political force, punk seems to have run it’s course, and is now mostly a fashion statement, and a good excuse not to clean and mop between shifts. Being punkers, maybe maintenance day was a chance to make the place uglier.
The bartender warned us the house beers were undrinkable. I thought that was nice of him. I ordered a couple of Live Oaks so people at our table could try them. After a couple rounds, our desire to be in Lovejoy’s had run its course, and we decided to check out the Ginger Man.
The nightlife is centered on five streets in Austin, each with its own personality. Sixth Street has been staked out by the twenty year olds. Crammed with vomitoriums, it’s similar to Bourbon Street, and a place to avoid if you’re over the age of twenty-five. Fifth Street is for people aged 25 to 30, who have reached the point where they prefer to throw up in the privacy of their own home. Fourth is for somewhat mature, down-to-earth people. Third is full of clubs, and Second has a lot of nice restaurants, which morph into hipster joints after midnight.
The Ginger Man, on Fourth, was packed when we arrived. After ordering a round, our group went outside onto the patio. Thanks to the chilly temperatures, we had it all to ourselves. As the night progressed, Johnny V ordered some high octane 750’s, and we inexorably worked our way towards the barleywines. By the time my cousin Chip arrived around 8 p.m., we belonged on Fifth Street.
Chip McElroy, from Live Oak, showed up shortly thereafter, and we ordered some of his barleywine, the Tree Hugger, aged in bourbon barrels. I began wondering where you went after Sixth Street, because that’s where we were headed. We needed food, but our reservations at Hudson on the Bend, famous for their wild game, had come and gone. Chip McElroy suggested we go to Lambert’s down on Second.
The Tampa crew headed over to Antone’s, “the” place to catch live bands in Austin, for the Gourd’s show. Chip and I said goodbye to Mr. McElroy, and headed down to Lambert’s, a well-heeled barbecue spot. The place was packed, but we found two seats at the bar. They had a pretty good beer list, and we ordered a couple of pints, and then cut ourselves off. I got the lamb two ways, and it was excellent. We wound up closing Lambert’s down, and then I drove home very carefully, not wanting to end up on whatever street the jail was on.
Thursday
January 24th
Austin, Texas
Josh Wilson, brewer and general manager at the Draught House Pub and Brewery, knows how to make the best of a bad situation. One look at his brewing system - poorly designed and incredibly inefficient - will tell you that. Or how about the fact that he used to own the Draught House, but is making more money now that he doesn’t? Clearly Josh is good at turning negatives into positives.
The downs and ups started when he graduated from Brooklyn College. Wanting to attend film school, he packed up his stuff and drove to Austin, a place he knew nothing about.
“As soon as I saw Austin, I started crying,” he said. “It’s so much uglier than Brooklyn.”
Most people think Austin, a land of lakes, rolling hills, and Mediterranean architecture, compares favorably with the nicest parts of Italy. Not Josh. He would much prefer a loft in Williamsburg, next door to Barcade.
“I won’t be moving back any time soon, though,” he said. “Williamsburg is even more expensive than Austin.”
Realizing he couldn’t afford to turn back, and that he needed a job to support himself, Josh applied for a position he knew nothing about: assistant brewer.
“When I moved here I didn’t know anything about making beer,” he said. “Back in Brooklyn, I drank malt liquor. Midnight Dragon was my favorite. It was horrible stuff, but it had that great label and you really couldn’t beat the price.”
Despite his taste in beer, and his complete lack of experience, he landed a job at the Bitter End, a brewpub in downtown Austin. He fell in love with his new job almost immediately, and dropped out of film school. As an assistant at the Bitter End, he became friends with the Alan Pugsley of Texas - so called because he set up bad brewing systems all over the state - and the two of them decided to start their own place. Josh quit the Bitter End (which burned down a few years ago), just after his new partner was fired.
“We bought this place in ’95, and my partner put in the system we have now,” Josh said. “It’s modeled after the Pugsley system, which explains the brick lining around the kettle. We opened the Draught House for $42,000 - the 7 barrel brewing system cost us less than $10,000. It would have been more, but my partner had a tendency not to pay people.”
That was one of the reasons their partnership didn’t work out, and they were forced to sell. Against the odds, however, Josh hit it off with the new owners and wound up as the brewer and general manager. He now brews once or twice a week, about 400-500 barrels a year.
““I follow my muse as far as styles go,” Josh said. “For three months I might only do Belgian beers. And then I’ll go on to doing something else.”
He can go wherever he wants with his own beers because the Draught House has 78 guest taps, covering every style imaginable. He loves the variety that comes with having such a large selection, as well as the freedom it gives him as a brewer, though it can also be a curse.
“People see all those taps and sometimes don’t realize we brew beer,” he said. “My stuff can get lost in the shuffle.”
Which is too bad, because his smoked porter is one of the better ones I’ve had, and compares well with the beer that defined the style, the Alaskan smoked porter. Iris liked his coffee stout. Made with Ethiopian beans, it was less creamy than some versions of the style - more like black coffee than cafe au lait.
Josh’s beers are so good, people sometimes forget how great a beer bar the Draught House is. That’s the problem with doing two things at once. It can lead to a lack of focus, and neither part gets the recognition it deserves.
Another problem is the amount of work involved in being both brewer and general manager. “I’ve got to deal with the business side of things, paying all the bills, ordering all the beer, putting it all away, writing the emails...it’s endless. Then I’ve got to find time to make beer. And now, on top of all that, I’m dealing with the malt and hop shortages.”
Josh thinks the hop shortage in particular is going to cut down on the creativity in the craft beer world. He compares it to an artist who is suddenly told he can only paint in a few colors. Then he thinks about it some more, and, once again making the best of a bad situation, says it also might force brewers into being even more creative.
“Beer drinkers are hooked on trying new things, so we’ll have to be inventive to keep them happy,” he said. “We’ll have to go in directions we haven’t thought of before.”
If Josh could do it over again, he would reduce the number of faucets, and carry a maximum of three dozen guest beers. And given his optimistic nature, it’s no surprise the he is planning to once again have his own place. A brewing system is sitting in his backyard, all ready to go. But he’s going to wait a while, until the hop and malt shortages work themselves out. And it won’t be in Brooklyn.
“Are you kidding? I’m going to die in Austin,” Josh said. Though he was making fun of his adopted city, at the same time he made it sound like dying in Austin wasn’t a bad way to go.
Wednesday
January 23
Austin, Texas
Chip McElroy, the owner of Live Oak Brewing in Austin, Texas, loves to talk about beer. Unfortunately, thanks to his doctorate in biochemistry, it’s hard to understand half of what he says. For instance, when I asked him what made his beers unique, he said it was his insistence on using imported malts and an Old World brewing method known as the decoction mash. I didn’t know what decoction mashing was, so he explained it to me. I still didn’t know, so I asked him to explain it in a way a history major could understand. This was what he said:
“In order to get the starch out of your malt and convert it into sugar, you have to add water and raise the temperature. The mash tun has a steam jacket, and you can heat it up that way, or you can add boiling water. A third option is decoction, and it’s probably the most pain in the ass way you could think of, where you pull off a portion of the mash and boil it separately, and then add it back into the mash tun, and raise the temperature that way.”
Knowing I would never really understand what decoction was, I asked him why they did it, especially if it was such a pain in the ass. He said that back in the old days, the European malt was less modified, meaning it was less efficient. So by boiling it, you could work the mash harder, and get more out of it.
“Under modified malt doesn’t work very well but tastes really good,” Chip explained. “It’s what they use in authentic Czech pilsner, which is why we use it.”
You can make a nice pilsner using North American malts with a smidgen of Vienna or Munich malt. But if you want to make a really crisp pilsner, you have to import the more expensive Czech malts, as Chip does.
“When we boil the mash, we caramelize some of the malt, which is different from using malt cooked in a kiln,” Chip said. “That’s how we get the dry malt character in our beer. It’s the under modified malt that helps keeps it light but firm, as opposed to being sweet, thick and heavy. ”
Walking around his brewery, I noticed his tanks were laying on their sides. I asked if it was because his ceilings were so low. The answer was of course no, though I had unwittingly hit upon another reason his pilsner tasted so clean. According to Chip, Czech-style pilsner gives off a lot of sulfury smells during fermentation. The increased surface area inside a horizontal tank helps release more of the odors. Also, when the beer is spread out over a larger area, more yeast can be added, which means the individual cells have less work to do.
The horizontal tanks also improve the complexity of his German-style hefeweizen, the other beer he’s known for. I had a feeling I wouldn’t understand why, but I listened anyway.
“The esters in a hefeweizen are really volatile,” Chip said, “so much so that the CO2 bubbles created by fermentation can scrub them away. In a horizontal tank, the bubbles have less distance to travel, so they leave more of the esters behind.”
The fact that the horizontal tanks released more of the smells in a pilsner, and preserved them in his hefeweizen sounded like a contradicition to me. I guess the most important thing is that the beer tastes good. In 2007, Beer Advocate Magazine named Chip’s hefeweizen the fourteenth best beer on the planet, while his pilsner is one of the fastest growing beers in the Austin market.
Walking around the Live Oak brewery, the space looks ready for an episode of “Extreme Makeover.” The place is falling apart at the seams, which makes his well-put-together beers seem even more impressive. Housed in an abandoned warehouse, Chip calls Live Oak a “Frankenstein brewery.” I’m not sure what that means. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that all the equipment in his brewery, except his 30 barrel mash tun and kettle, were originally designed to process cheese. I do know there are statues of Frankenstein popping out of numerous doorways.
In any case, his monster needs a larger home. Despite the fact that Live Oak only sells keg beer, sales are increasing 30% annually, and there’s only room for a couple more dairy tanks. Unfortunately, Austin’s incredible popularity has led to a tight real estate market.
“This is such a great place to live,” Chip said. “The people are incredibly friendly and down to earth. The great bands come here and play smaller venues. We’ve got the University of Texas, and there isn’t a fancy restaurant in Austin you can’t wear shorts to, though they might look at you a little strangely if you wear them in the winter.”
I glanced down at Chip’s shorts. It was winter and the temperature in his brewery was about fifty degrees.
“And Austin has a growing beer community,” he continued. “A lot of people think Live Oak has been successful because we’re specializing in pilsner and hefe. But that’s not true because we can’t sell our pilsner in Houston - they just don’t get it. While here in the Austin area I can’t keep up with the demand.”
Chip has had some trouble selling his pilsner and hefeweizen to the craft beer crowd interested in more extreme styles. “There are a lot of beer nuts who’ll only drink a double extra stout made with hops picked by virgins,” he said. “They turn their nose up at a pilsner, no matter how authentic it is.”
According to Chip, his offerings appeal more to the beer connoisseur - the customer who understands a well made, well thought out beer. The success of Live Oak may also be helped by fact that the Austin area, known locally as the Texas hill country, was originally settled by Czech and German immigrants.
“Barbecue has both a Mexican and a German genealogy,” he said.
Chip continues to run Live Oak on a shoestring, self-distributing his beers, and doing a lot of the work himself, though he now has help from brewer Steve Anderson.
“We don’t have sales people,” Chip explained. “Just a driver who delivers our beer and cleans lines in-town, and one who handles our out-of-town business. One of them also makes our tap handles out of live oak trees.”
Live oaks dominate the Austin area, and are beloved throughout the Texas hill country, partly because they keep their leaves year round - as opposed to trees that lose their leaves and appear “dead” in the winter. The live oak never changes, but just goes on an on, outlasting everything around them. They can live for hundreds of years, thriving in a land others find inhospitable.
Not a bad symbol for a Texas brewing company making Old World beers that have stood the test of time, even if only a select few will ever understand why.
Saturday
January 19th
Houston, Texas
When it comes to beer bars, Houston is where it all began for me. Back in January of 1990, I drove cross country with Todd Harrington, a friend I’d known since first grade. Because of the weather, we took I-10 and eventually stopped in Houston. A friend of a friend showed us around town, and suggested we stop at a new place called the Ginger Man. I had been a bartender for three years at the Riverrun Cafe in Tribeca, so I was familiar with craft beer as it was practiced on the East Coast. In those days, recent start-ups like Brooklyn Brewery, and Dock Street in Philadelphia, received most of their direction from Europe, which had been making beer a certain way for hundreds of years.
Walking into the Ginger Man, the first thing I noticed was the twenty+ taps jutting out of the wall. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Then I wondered why anyone would need so many handles, since there weren’t that many great beers, or so I thought until the bartender slid me their photo-copied menu. All the beers were from the west coast, and except for Anchor Steam, I didn’t recognize any of them. The bartender, used to confused young men with eastern accents, offered a suggestion.
“Why don’t you try this new one,” she said. “It’s called Sierra Nevada.”
I sipped my first Sierra and the citrus flavors exploded in my mouth. I looked at the bartender. “What the hell was that?”
“Hops,” she said, smiling. “You like it?”
I glanced over at Todd. “I want to live in Houston,” I said. I noticed my friend had a foolish grin on his face, too.
“Have you noticed how all the women are looking at us?” He asked. “And how beautiful they are?”
I checked the room, and he was right - it was full of gorgeous women with “come hither” smiles on their faces.
“They never do that in New York,” Todd said. He was right about that too - the only time women in New York smiled at us was when we gave them our chairs as we were leaving.
“You have to taste this beer,” I said. “It’s incredible.”
“What?” Todd said. “Are you crazy? Look at them. They’re smiling. I don’t even know where to start. When does this place close?”
Todd wasn’t as into great beer as I was. But he was definitely into beautiful women who were into him.
I turned back to the bartender. “You have anything else like that last one?” I asked.
“They’re all like that,” she said.
I eyed those 20 tap handles, each one of them begging for my attention.
“This place is paradise,” Todd said.
“I know,” I replied.
Eighteen years later - almost to the day - I was back in Houston, slowly making my way back to the Ginger Man. But first, Iris and I stopped at Saint Arnold’s. Opened by Brock Wagner in 1994, Saint Arnold’s was the first craft brewery in Texas. I had emailed Brock the day before, but hadn’t heard anything yet. From the website, I knew they offered tours of the brewery on Saturdays, so I figured we’d stop by and introduce ourselves, maybe talk to Brock or set up an appointment.
We arrived just before the tour started, and there was a line out the door. There must have been about 1000 people already inside. Our tour guide was up in a tower, looking down on the milling crowd. Using a microphone, he told us the history of beer, followed by the history of St. Arnold’s. I felt like I was at one of those evangelical mega-churches, except no one was listening. Instead, they were fingering their four beer tokens, waiting for communion. After 45 minutes, the sermon ended, and the crowd surged towards the bar. We had all paid $5 for a tasting glass and the tokens, good for four beers, and it looked like everyone wanted to be saved at once.
I really wanted to try the Winter Stout and the Elissa IPA. After 20 minutes of waiting, however, we hadn’t moved an inch closer to the bar. I realized that if someone didn’t part the mass of humanity in front of me, I wouldn’t be drinking any time soon. We finally gave up and left, feeling less than satisfied.
Out in the parking lot, I told Iris it was time for the Ginger Man. We found it down by the Rice University campus, which explained the beautiful coeds all those years ago. It looked the same, minus the young women, though I was more interested in the fact that they had doubled the number of taps. They also had a hand pump featuring the Elissa IPA.
The beer was creamy, and the cask had mellowed the citrus flavors, though it left a nice hoppy taste in my mouth. Still, it had to compete with some incredible memories, and the fact that you never forget your first West coast hop bomb. I tried the Saint Arnold Winter Stout next, enjoying the taste of chocolate and dark, dried fruit. I examined the rest of the list, and realized how far I had come in 18 years. Of the 50+ beers on tap, there were only a few I hadn’t tried, including the offerings from Live Oak and Real Ale, both from Texas.
On the other hand, I still got giddy when I walked into a big beer bar I had never visited before, as happened the next day, when we watched the NFL playoffs at the Flying Saucer. They had more taps than the Ginger Man, including some winter seasonals I hadn’t tasted. I tried the IPA from Live Oak, while Iris ordered their Hefe. Both beers were very well made - the Hefe was one of the best I’d had - so I made a mental note to send them an email. I tried New Belgium’s winter seasonal, the 2 Below Zero, an extra special/strong bitter. I liked Full Sail’s Wassail better, giving me a burst of malt and spices, with a warm hoppy finish.
Iris and I had never been to a Flying Saucer before, and we both liked it. Despite being a chain, the space had a lot of character, while the staff was friendly, knowledgeable, and mostly female. I found the short school-girl skirts distracting, but in a good way. The food was typical brewpub fare, though Iris really liked the chili, which came in a bread bowl. The bar was located in downtown Houston. Made up mostly of office buildings, the city is deserted on weekends. Still, they had a nice crowd, though there were plenty of seats to choose from, even at the bar.
Houston definitely has a quality beer scene. The only problem is it’s in Houston, which is little more than a cluster of skyscrapers surrounded by strip malls, all linked some of the most dangerous freeways on the planet.
To be honest, I didn’t start to enjoying Houston until it was a memory again.
Thursday
January 17th
New Orleans, Louisiana
As we approached New Orleans, taking advantage of our campground’s free shuttle to the Quarter, I warned Iris that almost everyone had a strong reaction to the Crescent City. I had a feeling I knew what hers would be, though I kept my fingers crossed. Driving across Lake Pontrachain, then through the abandoned homes festering on either side of I-10, our driver told us how there were plenty of jobs in New Orleans, but a dearth of places to live. We finally dropped down off the highway and weaved our way through some of the struggling neighborhoods surrounding the Quarter. The restored homes really stuck out against the houses still waiting for their owners to return.
“Most of the people who used to live here won’t be back,” our driver said. “They’ve discovered there’s another side of life in the places they moved to, and it’s a lot different from what they had here.”
He took us past buildings that still bore spray painted codes from the search and rescue teams. “The numbers tell you the date the house was searched, the team that checked it, and the number of bodies they found,” our driver explained. “That was so the body recovery teams that came along later would know where to go.” Though some of the buildings had been restored, the owners had preserved the markings as a grim reminder of what had happened.
My anticipation rose as we approached the French Quarter. It was on higher ground and had only suffered some minor flooding. “If anything,” our driver said, “the Quarter is cleaner than before the storms.” I stared out the window as we passed the French Market. I hadn’t seen Decatur Street in three years, but it looked the same to me. I doubted even a force 5 hurricane could blow away the genteel decadence that oozed from every pore of the city; not for long anyway. Iris already looked like she needed a shower. Her phobia about germs was probably in hyper-drive.
Thinking about how close I was to some of my favorite haunts, I could feel the hair on the back of my knuckles beginning to rise. New Orleans has more great bars than any other place on earth. But it was only ten in the morning, so I forced myself to be patient. I was still recovering from my recent illness, and my insides were tender. Also, if I suddenly began eating and drinking like a Roman emperor, I might prejudice Iris’s opinion of New Orleans. It would be better for me, and fairer to the city, if I let my morals unravel in increments, rather than all at once.
In New Orleans, I always started my day with cafe au lait at Cafe du Monde. I usually avoided the beignets, but I knew Iris would enjoy them so I ordered some. When the square doughnuts appeared, they were only vague shapes beneath a pile of powdered sugar. Iris was still sick so she limited herself to one, along with a small cup of the chicory flavored coffee, black. It was cold out, so we had to sit inside. I told her that to really experience du Monde you have to sit outdoors beneath the dark green awning, preferably early in the morning when most of the Quarter was still sleeping off the night before.
To help get our bearings after breakfast, we visited the New Orleans Visitor Center, sponsored by the National Park Service. The city’s unique culture - there isn’t any place like it in the rest of the States - lined the Center’s walls, right down to the genealogical roots of gumbo, the perfect symbol of the melting pot we were about to explore. Having brushed up on our history, I took Iris on a more personal tour of the Quarter, pointing out some of my favorite eating spots, including the Acme Oyster Bar, Felix’s, and Antoine’s.
Bourbon Street was a lot dirtier (in every sense of the word) than I remembered and I could tell Iris was put off by it. Continuing south, I hoped Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop would cheer her up. I knew it would make me feel better. Once owned by the Lafitte brothers, Jean and Pierre, it was supposedly a front for more profitable pursuits, like slaving. Lafitte’s claims to be the oldest bar in the United States, housed in the oldest building in the Mississippi Valley. The partially exposed walls have always looked like the only thing holding them up was their 300 years of momentum.
Inside the crooked door, the original throne-like fireplace appears to be the only thing holding up the ceiling. The sole Illumination comes from candles lining the nooks of the back bar, though the light falls short of the darker corners, popular places for late-night affairs amongst the locals. I ordered an Abita amber and soaked it all in. When I visit New Orleans, Lafitte’s is always my first stop, and my last. That way I can tell people, “yeah, I wound up at Lafitte’s last night,” without having to rely on my memory. When I’m in New Orleans, my brain seems to have a more shadowy areas than Lafittes.
My thoughts were interrupted by some growling coming from stool next to mine. Iris’s stomach was backing up on her, and she was nauseous as well. We found some Gas-X around the corner, and she popped a couple of pills. The ensuing walk up Royal Street, much prettier than Bourbon, cheered her up. So did some shopping, though we didn’t actually buy anything. By 12:30 she felt well enough for lunch, and we stopped at Bacco. Iris played it safe and ordered a plate of grilled red fish, while I opted for the crab meat cannelloni submerged in an inch of butter and cream. I usually like to keep lunch under 8000 calories, but I figured I only had two days so why not splurge.
Having polished off the “Gout Special,” we stopped in at the Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone. Truman Capote claimed to have been born in the Monteleone, though he only lived there. Over the years, he brought enough famous authors, including Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, that the Carousel is now an official literary landmark. It’s also one of America’s first revolving bars, and looks like a circus carousel without the horses. The gilded seats make a complete revolution every fifteen minutes. Climbing aboard two of the fixed stools, we had a great conversation with the bartender. Marvin has been living in the Quarter for 20 years and still loves it, though he said Bourbon Street had degenerated since the storms.
“Guys like Larry Flynt (founder of the Hustler empire) took advantage of all the government money available after the storm,” Marvin said, “and we’ve got over a dozen strip clubs now. Bourbon used to be risqué, like burlesque. Now it’s more like pornography. But it goes in cycles.”
I asked him about the three Abita beers he had on tap. Marvin said there had always been two Abita lines, and the bar added a third after Katrina. “They all move really well. People want to drink something local, and help support the people who are living and working here.”
As we circled around the room, Marvin had to move to keep up with us. He said the Abita Saison had been very popular, as well as the Nut Brown and IPA. Right now he had the Alt beer on, as well as the Amber and the Light. Most of his business was still in cocktails, but the beers were holding their own, particularly during the day when people wanted something lighter.
He suggested we head over to the Crescent City Brewpub. I hadn’t had much luck there in the past, but said we’d check it out, after a walk down to d.b.a. Marvin was a big fan of d.b.a., saying he went there for both the beer and the music. “For locals like me, Frenchman is probably our favorite area. d.b.a. opened at just the right time. Now everyone wants to have a place down there.”
We walked down Chartres, past St. Louis Cathedral, and, just before it, my personal shrine, the Napoleon House. I told Iris we had to stop there before we caught the shuttle back to our campground. All she said was, “You sure are drinking a lot.” Her comment caught me off guard. Compared to previous trips, I hadn’t really started.
Turning onto Frenchman, the situation turned bleaker - d.b.a didn’t open until 5 pm, still two hours away. Most of the bars didn’t get going until early evening. In fact, getting a real feel for the Quarter during the day was a challenge. We didn’t have much choice, however. Our shuttle made the return trip to our campground at 5 p.m. If we missed it, our only way home would be a $50+ cab ride.
We trudged back up Royal. Iris looked ready to call it a day. It didn’t help that she wasn’t feeling well. New Orleans is about eating and drinking, then stumbling off to hear some great music, followed by more eating and drinking, until it’s time to set your cocktail on the piano at Lafittes and sing along with whoever is playing. In the morning, it’s coffee and a paper at Cafe du Monde, breakfast at Mother’s, and a light lunch of Gulf Coast oysters washed down with some Abita bock. Following my usual schedule, I rarely slept more than a few hours, but never felt tired. The dark energy steaming up from the bayous gave me the staying power of a college freshman.
New Orleans was having a negative effect on Iris. Thanks to her bad stomach she couldn’t eat or drink much, and the music didn’t get going until later. Casting a pall over my own experience, I was having trouble explaining why I loved New Orleans so much. I could no longer say it was the kind of place you had to be experience to appreciate. She was experiencing it.
The Napoleon House nearly saved the day. Even Iris loved sitting at the tiny bar surrounded by the 200 years of history peeling off the walls. It was the first time she had come alive since our arrival. And then it was time to go, and we were riding over Lake Pontrachain in the fading light, past the derelict neighborhoods that wouldn’t be rebuilt. By the time we made it back to the campground, I realized I didn’t want to go back the next day. We had seen enough of New Orleans for this trip. You can’t do the Crescent City halfway. You have to stay in the Quarter and let it swallow you whole, for better or worse. Maybe some day Iris could come back and try again, when she was feeling better.
New Orleans would still be there. A couple of storms weren’t going to wipe away all that debauchery masquerading as history.
Tuesday
January 15th
Abita Springs, Louisiana
After Hurricane Katrina hit, Dave Blossman, the owner of Abita
Brewing, wasn’t sure if his business would survive. New Orleans, which
drank 70% of his beer, was basically shut down, and no one knew when it
would be open again. All his employees survived the flooding, but a lot
of them lost their homes. Before the storm, Abita was growing 25%
annually, and Dave was about to start construction on a major
expansion, including a large tourist center. The next thing he knew,
Abita was closed for two weeks while he reassembled his staff. In the
aftermath of the storm, everything was put on hold while Dave
concentrated on just keeping his business above water, literally.
“As you all know after 9/11, the worst brings out the best in
people,” Dave said. “People around here showed their true colors. We
all banded together and helped out those who needed it, and started
rebuilding. But there was a lot of uncertainty.”
Rather than wait for New Orleans to come back online - a big
unknown at the time - Dave pushed sales in the rest of Louisiana. The
move paid off as the company experienced 100% growth in Baton Rouge,
Lafayette, and their own backyard, the north shore of Lake Pontrachain.
Now sales in New Orleans are back to where they once were, and growing
20% annually throughout the state, making Abita bigger than it was
before Katrina.
Some of this newfound popularity has to do with one of the first
moves Dave made following the storm. “Katrina hit on the last day of
August, and by October we had launched Restoration Ale. It usually
takes six months to get a new brand into the market. We did it in 35
days, which we’re real proud of. During the last two years, we were
able to raise over $550,000 in hurricane relief through sales of the
beer, which is a lot for a small company like ours.”
Restoration Pale Ale, now one of Abita’s flagship beers, became a
symbol of the brewery’s determination to bounce back. It also produced
a tremendous amount of good will towards the brand.
“We’ve gained a lot of market share since the storm,” Dave said.
“We’re the number two beer on tap in New Orleans. If the trends
continue, we’ll pass Anheuser-Busch in about a year, and become number
one.”
This year they’ll sell about 75,000 barrels. When the brewery
expansion is finished, they’ll have the capability to produce 125,000.
Dave’s also adding a new warehouse and cold rooms, as well as a waste
treatment facility, and a slew of new tanks. For Dave, however, the new
visitor center is the chief symbol of Abita’s rebound from some dark
days.
“It meant a lot when we were finally able to build the visitors
center and tasting room,” Dave said. The new complex, with offices
upstairs, are designed to resemble a street in the French Quarter,
complete with gas lamps beneath a wrought iron balcony. There’s a
fountain in the brick courtyard, along with a fancy outdoor grill.
Beer geeks will be interested in Abita’s new cask room, built for
long term aging, which will allow Dave’s brewers to experiment a
little. He wants to do single batch brews as well as bottle conditioned
bombers, the first of which will feature the Andygator, his barleywine,
followed by an 8% abbey ale. Abita has always been fairly conservative
as far as its product line goes - they’re a southern brewery after all,
with a mostly southern customer base - but they’re already making a
dry-hopped IPA that clocks in at 50 IBU’s and 6.5%. Called Jockimo, I
found the beer smooth and clean, with a nice snap at the end. Dave
hopes to have it available in New York City fairly soon.
Seeing Abita restore itself is a heartening experience. According
to Dave, the city of New Orleans is going through a similar rebirth,
though it’s still only about half the size, population-wise, of its
former self.
“There are large parts of the old New Orleans that are still
abandoned,” Dave said. “And to be honest, they shouldn’t be rebuilt. We
don’t have the infrastructure to be as spread out as we were before.
The city needs to be about half the size it was in order to survive.”
When a planning commission said the same thing, they were sharply
criticized and sent back to the drawing board. The Crescent City might
want to emulate what Abita did. When the storm blew away the brewery’s
customer-base, Dave and his staff put all their expansion plans on hold
while they retrenched and focused on building up a new business model,
one that was much more diversified, and less vulnerable, than the old
one. Abita is no longer so dependent on New Orleans, and is a much
stronger company. In the end, thanks to a lot of perseverance and hard
work, Katrina wound up strengthening Dave Blossman’s brewery, rather
than destroying it.
Maybe some day we’ll be able to say the same thing about the city of New Orleans.
Sunday
January 13th
The Florida Panhandle
I should have known better than to eat raw oysters at a pirate theme bar, where the chief sport was drinking the eight drafts in a single sitting, known as “Walking the Plank.” Quite a few people were playing the game, and they had reached the point where ordering a beer made them laugh. The list was mostly imports, and by the time I finished eating my fateful meal, the afternoon crowd was having trouble staying aboard their stools.
Then again, I had been playing my own version of “Walk the Plank” since leaving New York, so it might not have been the oysters, or the equally “fishy” fish and chips, but a simple case of my body deciding to mutiny. Whatever the reason for my sudden illness, springing a leak in my lower decks certainly livened things up at the Ho Hum Trailer Park, our home away from home on the Florida panhandle.
Only one thing could have made things worse: Iris coming down with a similar ailment. She did, of course, a couple days after me. Imagine the two of us sardined on a 48” bed, our insides turning to liquid. The rumbling in our intestines left Cinnamon cowering under the dinette, the same way he does during thunder storms. When we no longer had the strength for the run/walk to the public bath house, we tested the digestion of the head in our trailer. What followed gave new meaning to the phrase, “Hey honey, this trip will be a great opportunity to get to know each other.” Thanks to our plumbing issues, we didn’t spend much time exploring Florida’s “Forgotten Coast,” a sweeping curve of white sand beaches hugging the Gulf of Mexico. Somehow we managed to check out the Gibson Inn in Apalachicola. Owned by a husband and wife team, the restored turn-of-the century inn is famous for its tasteful renovation and its high quality cuisine. The husband spent time at the French Laundry in Napa, while the wife is a renowned pastry chef from Chicago. Neither of us had any interest in food, however, or its painful aftermath. What we really needed was an I. V. drip. I can tell you the Victorian bar, where I managed a few sips of Affligem Tripel, was an old world mix of green wainscoting and dark brown mahogany. The route to the bathroom was decorated with old pictures of the inn, though I was moving too fast to examine them closely.
Two days later, we dragged our sore asses to Lillian, Alabama. We had heard about a brewpub called McGuires in nearby Pensacola, which wound up being a disappointment. An old Irish joint - the stereo played every sappy Irish ballad ever recorded - the dark interior was wall papered with 30 years worth of dollar bills. They’re also famous for a 10% barleywine called “I’ll Have What the Gentleman on the Floor is Having.” The gentleman on the floor must have drunk it all because it wasn’t on tap during our visit, and the rest of the beers were bland. They did have a bowl of navy bean soup for 18 cents, the same price they charged when they first opened in 1977. It tasted like a soup that had just celebrated its thirtieth birthday.
Returning back to the trailer, I spent another day in bed, watching the Giants beat the heavily favored Cowboys. Seeing Jerry Jones look the way I felt boosted my spirits. We were scheduled to be in Phoenix, site of this year’s Super Bowl, the first week of February, and I wondered if the Giants might be joining us.
Curling up in the fetal position, I told Iris I would avoid oysters and clams the rest of the trip. And in honor of Florida’s “Forgotten Coast,” we both agreed to forget what we had seen and heard in our trailer over the past three days.
Monday - Thursday
January 7-10
Cedar Key, Florida
Though our trip has had a lot of fun moments, it’s been a lot harder than either of us would have ever imagined. As people constantly tell us, we’re living the dream, visiting one great brewery after another, tasting a lot of great beer, though, for me, the best part of the trip has been the people we’ve met. But packing up and moving every couple of days isn’t easy. Trying to keep up with the blogs, take all the pictures, and shoot the videotape is tough too. Not to mention all the logistics involved: finding campgrounds, grocery stores, and whatever else we need to keep moving forward.
Living on the road, you’re exposed to one new experience after another: people, places, bugs, flat tires, deep fried food, Corona. And except for fried food and Corona, nothing ever becomes routine enough to achieve the comfort of familiarity. The adventure is relentless. Unlike at home, there’s no place to hide when it all becomes too much. Consequently, we hit the wall once in a while. Those are the days when the smallest thing sets you off, and nothing makes you feel better. You’re pissed off at your hitch and you have no idea why, which makes it even worse. Even Cinnamon hits the wall, the days when he doesn’t stare at you with pleading eyes while you’re eating, and he’s too tired to fertilize the campground, which has become his life purpose since our trip began.
Luckily, none of us has hit the wall at the same time, and having all been through it, we try to be supportive, and if that doesn’t work, we keep our heads down until the anger subsides, usually by the following day.
In any case, without really knowing it, I think I’ve been searching for the wall’s opposite, a place that makes me feel great for no good reason, a place where I can lay down and rest in peace, where I might even want to be buried some day, though hopefully not in my trailer. While I’ve seen quite a few places I’d love to come back to, I hadn’t found that special special spot that made me want to dig a hole, jump down into it, stretch out, and tell Iris to start shoveling.
Well, I think I may have discovered my happy hunting grounds - Cedar Key, located just below Florida’s panhandle. According to the local paper, the nearest stoplight is thirty miles away, and it’s blinking. The town is on a small island at the end of a causeway, and the minute I saw it I knew I was somewhere different, though I couldn’t quite figure out what it was that put the unblinking smile on my face.
Sure the town hasn’t changed much since the 1950’s, or even the 1850’s, when Cedar Key was built. And there isn’t much to do besides watch the locals dry their clamming nets on the side of the road, or maybe spend the day figuring out if the tide is coming in or going out. There are some great raw bars, most of them on stilts, and a dozen oysters or clams pulled up from the surrounding flats will only cost you $8. The Island Inn, which was the first commercial structure in Cedar Key - it started as a brothel - also has a great little bar that serves Sam Smith Oatmeal Stout. The foods good too, especially if you love butter. Periodically, various guests pull up to the piano in the lobby and start playing for no apparent reason. I guess they just feel like it.
Everyone looks like they’ve been through a few hurricane’s too many - people around here just tough them out, though they’re only two feet above sea level - but they’re all friendly. Andy, the Island Inn’s owner, called us regulars after Iris and I flip flopped into his bar three evenings in a row.
The roads are all short and full of potholes and speckled with bird shit, and nobody strays too far over the 30 mph speed limit, though there was only one police car and it always seemed to be parked in the same place, with no one in it. Maybe people aren’t in a hurry. After four days on the island, I had trouble getting my truck up to 25. My Tundra and I were that relaxed. At night, you’re far enough away from the city that you can see just about every star. There aren’t any condos on the island, and there hasn’t been any development, though there are plans to build some sort of club and spa, with homes around it. Something tells me it won’t happen, though. Not in Cedar Key. Everybody’s too busy toasting sunsets over the Gulf.
I’ve been here a few days now and I still don’t know why I like it so much. Every time I think I’ve got the reason, my mind wanders off and I forget what it was. It’s hard to stay focused in a place like this. In fact, I can’t remember what my point was. Oh well, I guess it’s time to open another beer and hit the rewind button.
Later that day...Saturday
January 5th
Tampa, Florida
I met Bob Haa at Mr. Dunderbak’s, a German beer bar/deli/restaurant/marketplatz in a dying mall in Tampa, near South Florida University. We drove around back by the sheriff's office, and went in through the kitchen. Dunderbak’s is owned by J.B. Ellis, who takes good care of all his customers, particularly his local home brewers, the Tampa Bay B.E.E.R.S., who hold their official meetings here.
Unofficially they meet whenever the mood strikes them - or they’ve got a new batch to unveil - and a table of B.E.E.R.S. was waiting for us when we arrived, including Tom, Tony, Mike Vouch and his wife Popey. J.B.. took me on a quick tour of the place. He’s got 25 taps and a 200 foot bar on one side, and a deli counter and store opposite, as well as some tables.
Dunderbak’s is a 35 year old institution, though it’s only open until nine p.m. , like the mall - except for home brewers and J.B.’s friends, who come and go out the back. That includes the sheriff's department. J.B.. takes care of them and they watch his behind, as far as his hours go. Dunderbak’s was packed while we were there, and according to J.B.. it usually is, but he’s in the process of finding a new location so he can stay open longer.
Back at the table, Tom cracked a growler of a vanilla porter he had recently made. I liked it, but some at the table thought the vanilla was too pronounced. Mike Vouch, who works with Bob at Micro Man, the boutique beer distributor, opened a bottle of his Prestige clone, in which he had added some bourbon. I thought it compared well with the real Prestige, until he opened a second batch, in which he had added wood chips. It was even better.
Mike and Popey had just been up to New York City and they had visited the Tiger. Of course they walked by it three times before they found it. I guess we have to get a bigger sandwich board. They had a great time, though. I told him he was the first person I’d met during our current travels who had ever heard of the Blind Tiger, let alone been there. For that, I toasted him and Popey with another glass of his Prestige clone.
J.B. started dropping off German food and pints of beer. I had the double IPA from Left Coast, the Cappuccino Stout from Lagunitas, along with sausage and sauerkraut, freshly made potato pancakes, goulash, meat loaf with gravy, home fries with cheese...the food just kept coming.
Tony, another member of our table, is in the midst of opening a beer bar and restaurant in Oldsmar. He’s planning on 25 taps and a lot of bottles. The space is 1800 square feet, and he hopes to be open in three weeks. The whole build-out is costing him about $150,000. I choked on my goulash. That was what we paid twelve years ago to build the old Tiger, and it was less than half the size. I didn’t want to think about what the new Tiger cost, or the fact that you had to walk past it three times before you could even see it. I decided to drink more of Mike’s 10% Prestige clone to make myself feel better.
We finally asked for the check before J.B. could bring us any more food and beer. My bill was $9.74. I could have sworn I had three pints, a lot of home-brew, and four plates of food. I immediately programmed the back entrance of Mr. Dunderbak’s into my GPS, so I could find it again. I also told J.B. to call me with the new coordinates when he moved, and to let me know when he was heading to New York.
Our group headed for Ybor City in Tampa, about a fifteen minute drive through a maze of freeways. I just followed Bob’s Ford Ranger. Ybor used to be nothing but derelict cigar factories, until the city decided to revitalize the old warehouses with lofts, hip restaurants, and stores. They gave the commercial tenants sweetheart deals. According to Bob, the Tampa Bay Brewing Co., our next stop, wasn’t even paying rent. They had about five thousand square feet, plus a large outdoor bar. The interior was dark and stylish. We didn’t eat, but their kitchen has a great reputation. We lucked out on the beer - we got the last glass of their rauch beer, and it was really smokey. The porter was pretty good, but my IPA was terrible. Bob thought maybe the yeast had mutated too much. Just what I needed - some mutant IPA.
We headed a few blocks over to the New World Brewing Co. They no longer make beer, but they’ve got a large tap list and a huge number of bottles. They also make the best thin crust pizza around. Joe Raguckas was behind the bar. He seemed to know about our mission, saying Iris and I were living the dream, traveling around the country, visiting breweries. What could be better than that? Thinking about some of the trailer parks I’d showered in, I could think of a few things, but I just laughed and ordered a beer. I don’t remember what I was, but it tasted good. We ate a couple of pizzas and then everyone lit up cigars. Except me. I just sat there, looking around at the decor. The New World had done a great job finding antique signs from Ybor’s past, as well as other elements from Florida’s history. The space had a really unique, old Florida feel to it.
I sat back, inhaling the warm, smokey air. Maybe I really was living the dream. Of course it always feels that way at the end of the night...
Saturday
January 5th
Tarpon Springs, Florida
Ever wonder what would happen if you hooked up a red wine fermenter to a bunch of dairy tanks, then crossed it with a skateboard, a pump, and some PVC pipe? You’d wind up with the Saint Somewhere brewing system. In fact, Bob Sylvester, the proud owner of Saint Somewhere, doesn’t have a single piece of equipment that was originally designed to make beer. And yet he does make beer. Some truly excellent Belgian-style saison and amber.
His most impressive invention has to be the Sponge Bob skateboard he mounted with a reconditioned pump bought from a friend who also happens to be a sales manager for an industrial pump company. He pushes it around with a flag pole he mounted on the back.
The cheapest invention is his sparge, which is basically some water-grade PVC he shaped into a square and fit with four sprinkler heads. It cost $15. Then there’s his glycol system, which is really a freezer chest with a keg stuffed inside it. He rigged it with some tubing and a thermostat and called it a day. Cost: $200. Bob is clearly the person you want around if you’re marooned on a desert island and you still want some bottle conditioned beer.
For Bob, the jury-rigging all began when he started home brewing about eight years ago. He immediately became obsessed with it, especially the Belgian styles.
“Of course they don’t really have styles,” he said. “If it turns out well you call it something, and if it turns out bad, you dump it out. I threw out all the recipes pretty early on when I realized the really important stuff hadn’t been written down.”
Instead he began fooling around with different combinations of malt, yeast, hops, and various spices. For the Lectio Divina he wound up using pilsner malt, some wheat, caramelized sugar, and his saison yeast. He didn’t want to label it as any particular style, but the government insisted, so he calls it a Belgian amber.
For the Saison Athene, he took the pilsner malt and added some rosemary and black pepper, which play off the spicy flavors of the yeast really well, and then threw in some chamomile because it helped the whole concoction blend better, while giving it a fragrant nose. After he’s finished boiling this brew in his dairy tanks, he moves it in an open fermenter, which he bought from a winery.
“Winery equipment is cheaper and it’s more suited to the saison style than most of the brewery equipment out there,” he said. “My bottle filler is from a winery too.”
He doses the bottles with brettanomyces to give his beers some funk and help dry them out. Both his beers finish dry compared to many other saisons.
Bob had bottled his first seasonal the day before, and we opened some to try it out. Basically he added some hibiscus and Palmetto berries to his amber. The result was much different from the Lectio, as the Palmetto berries added a roasted, nutty flavor, and the hibiscus gave it undertones of dark fruit.
I asked Bob how he came up with the name for his brewery. “I’m a native Floridian - there’s about two of us left. I’m also a parrot head. I knew I wanted to do Belgian beers, so Saint had to be in the name somewhere. Then I was listening to Jimmy Buffet’s song ‘Boat Drinks,’ and he started singing about flying to Saint Somewhere. It just clicked.”
He took his beer to a Buffet concert once, and started handing it out in the parking lot. His fellow parrot heads got the name immediately. Bob was nervous, however, because Buffet has a deal with Budweiser, which makes his beer, Landshark.
“I was worried a black van was going to pull up and a bunch of guys in dark suits were going to jump out and take us all away. Nothing happened, though.”
In homage to his home state, Bob’s labels are from old posters the Florida Immigration service made up when they were trying to lure people south. “These days I think we might want to turn those posters around and start sending people away.”
His label for the Saison Athene is a tribute to Tarpon Springs, which contains the second largest Greek community in the country. They came here to fish for sponges in the Gulf. Bob chose Tarpon Springs for a more mundane reason: the rent was cheap.
Bob’s goal was to set up his entire business without going into debt. He did it. When I asked him how much the whole system cost, he guessed it came in around $50,000, which is incredibly cheap considering the cost of brewing equipment, even used, in today’s tight market. Still, when he rolls out the skate board pump, it looks like it cost a lot less than that. Then again, the price tag didn’t really matter, since his beer tasted as good, or better, than the Belgian-style saisons being made on state-of-the-art systems. It just goes to show you - it isn’t the equipment, it’s the brewer that matters. Bob could probably make great beer if you gave him a jug of water and a ball of twine.
Now his main goal is to quit his day job selling suits at Brooks Brothers. He has no desire to be rich. He just wants to make beer full time. The rave reviews he’s been receiving in the beer press lately should help make his dream a reality soon. In the mean time, he’s just happy to be brewing professionally...working on one of the most unprofessional systems you’ll ever see.
Friday
January 4th
Downtown St. Petersburg
After spending the entire day getting my truck serviced and the windshield replaced, I needed to visit Johnny V at the Independent, a beer bar in downtown St. Pete. I used to know Johnny V when he was selling Stella with Jim Picket up in New York. He moved to Florida a while back and became the first sales rep for Micro Man, the boutique beer distributor. He eventually left that job - and was replaced by Bob Haa - so he could open his own place, with his wife Veronica, on North 3rd St.
The day before, when I had spoken to Bob Haa on the phone, Johnny had been standing next to him. He got on the line and asked when I was coming down. I told him I’d be there the following night, and he said great, he’d be there. Then he recounted everything we had ever done together, including a steak dinner followed by a snowball fight. I could barely recall any of it. But I don’t have a photographic memory like Johnny. Of course, according to Bob Haa, Johnny's memory is only great when it comes to remembering the distant past - he can still recite all the phone numbers of all the bars and restaurants he used to call on - but not so special on a short term basis, like hey, did I pay any of my bills this month? Luckily for him, Veronica’s recollection works well in the present.
When Iris and I arrived at the Independent, Johnny wasn’t around. Apparently he had forgotten we were coming. Veronica apologized and said she had just called him and he was too hung over to get off the couch. Some friends were in town, and he had been out with them the night before. We told her not to worry, we’d catch him next time. Bob Haa was there, with his girlfriend Crystal, who’s a rep in the wine business. They met at a wine event, where Bob was manning the lone beer booth for Micro Man. When people got sick of spitting wine out of their mouths, they went to Bob. Crystal kept coming by, asking him all sorts of questions. She didn’t know anything about beer, Bob said, “but she had plenty of enthusiasm.”
Now, between the two of them, they’ve got their favorite beverages covered. When they go out to dinner, they figure out what kind of night it is - beer or wine - then they discuss their food options.
Bob used to brew for one of the Hops brewpubs, as well as St. Sebastian, a Belgian brewpub that recently closed. Not because of Bob. The Belgian owners had built their restaurant in Spring Hill, a nearby retirement community. They thought the spot would be a gold mine in about fifteen years or so - maybe when everyone died off and a younger generation moved in to replace them. Whatever their reasoning, they didn’t last six months. Bob’s much happier now.
“I got tired of the brewer lifestyle,” Bob said. “I also got tired of the money.” Or lack thereof.
He showed us around the Independent, which didn’t take long. It’s a rectangular room only a little bigger than the Tiger. The ceilings are a lot taller, however, and the sound echoes. We were all shouting at each other.
“Wait until later,” Bob said. “This place will be packed. You won’t be able to hear a thing.” Veronica rolled her eyes, thinking about it. I was glad the Independent was doing so well - Bob said it was his busiest account in St. Pete - and that while Veronica had to stay and work, we didn’t. In the mean time, we enjoyed the Cappuccino Stout on draft, along with bottles of Dupont’s Saison and Biere de Miel (Crystal’s favorite). We wanted to order the St. Somewhere Saison, so we could do a comparison, but it had just come in and wasn’t cold.
Bob pointed out the artwork high on the wall, asking what I thought of it. The half dozen brightly colored paintings reminded me of the stuff people did while dropping acid and listening to heavy metal back in the late seventies. He told me to look again. When I still didn’t get it, he pointed out how the hidden designs formed pints of beer. Johnny V came up with the idea, and worked with the painter. I think it would have been easier to see if I had been on something illegal.
Feeling hungry, we headed over to an English-style bar/restaurant - they carried Bob’s beers and Crystal’s wines, so it was an easy decision - known for its curry. The waitress fired out the specials in an annoying rapid fire voice. I didn’t want to hear her speak again, so I stuck with the red curry and a bottle of Xingu.
The curry was rich, thick, and spicy - the best I’ve had since visiting London. After we finished, Bob and I wanted to keep going, but Crystal had to get up for a trip the next morning. Iris was already thinking about our forty minute drive back to Dunedin. Bob said he would take me around Tampa the next night, after my visit with Bob Sylvester at St. Somewhere up in Tarpon Springs. Iris rolled her eyes. I hadn’t had a night off since Jacksonville, and she was getting exhausted just watching me.
I wasn’t. Like Johnny V, my short term memory was gone, and I could only see what was ahead of me, which is the best way to do a trip like this. If you think too much about what you’ve done...well, I don’t know what happens. I’m trying not to think about it.
Thursday
January 3rd
Dunedin, Florida
After setting up camp in the Tampa Bay area, we headed over to the Dunedin Brewery, which we had heard both good and bad things about. Luckily for us, their fortunes were on an upswing and the new brewer was talented. I really liked his Imperial Pilsner, Farmhouse Christmas, and IPA. The place looked like it had been built in a former garage composed of two large bays. The weather was cold while we were there - and cold in the brewpub too - so the garage doors were down, but I imagined it must have been a great spot during the warmer months. There was a stage area set up for a band - they feature music Weds through Sat, and host a drumming circle on Tuesdays. They also serve a Mexican menu.
I had parked the truck illegally across the street - their lot is tiny - so when a a couple of spots opened up in front of the brewery I ran outside and took one of them. A guy with a pony tail pulled into the other, and I noticed him eyeing my license plate. We ended up beside each other at the bar, and he asked where I was from in Vermont. I told him I had a cabin in Barnard. It turned out he was from Lebanon, New Hampshire and knew the Woodstock area well. His name was Tony and he had moved south about ten years earlier, when he got sick and tired of shoveling snow. Now he worked as a waiter at Kelley’s, a restaurant in Dunedin. He said we had to come by for breakfast - it was the best in the area. He was working Saturday and Sunday, and I said we’d stop by and see him.
My sister Laura lives in Safety Harbor, about ten miles south of Dunedin, and we had told her to meet us at the brewery a little after five. She still hadn’t shown up by 6:30, and Iris and I were both cold and hungry, so we left a message on her phone and took off. Troy Barfoot, of Micro-Man Distributors, had given me the phone number of Bob Haa, his counterpart in the Tampa area. When I called Bob and asked where we should eat in Dunedin, he had recommended either Casa Tina - his favorite Mexican spot - or Kelley’s. Having finished our beers, we headed for Casa Tina, a small, somewhat rundown place on Main Street.
As it turned out, Casa Tina has been so successful they’re building a new restaurant next door, which will open soon. We ordered Negra Modelo’s - they didn’t have anything else - and continued to wait for my sister. Eventually, we gave up on her and ordered a wild mushroom quesadilla, and the grilled fish fajita for two. Casa Tina is owned by a Mexican and Gringa couple, and it showed in the food. The tortillas were freshly made and still warm, and the fish was grilled just right. The salsa had a great roasted flavor, and the guac was really fresh. It was a great - and cheap, $35 for two, with beers - dinner.
My sister finally called. She had gotten a late start, and left her phone at home. By the time she reached Dunedin Brewery, we had already left. Eventually, she borrowed someone’s cell, and tracked us down. She told us about a bar restaurant called Bellini’s down the street. It was a beautiful place, with a large mostly empty bar. Laur told me they used to be packed every night thanks to a Spanish guitar player. When he asked for small raise, the owner fired him. He replaced him with a woman wearing dark, oversized glasses and what appeared to be a wig. Laur said it looked like she was in the witness protection program. Her voice was good, but she apparently didn’t have the charisma of the Spanish guitar player. No one was paying attention to her.
The owner had won his argument, and saved a few bucks, and now was in the process of losing his business. The places change, but the stories remain the same.
Wednesday
January 2nd
Deland, Florida
Iris and I arrived at the Abbey at 3pm the next day, only to discover Todd’s beer cooler had broken down, so he couldn’t take us over to Knightly Spirits. Instead, once his compressor was working again, he showed us around Deland. We stopped for a Lagunitas Censored at Cafe de Vinci, a live music venue owned by some friends of his. They had a punk band playing that night. Iris wandered out of the bar and into the architectural salvage store next door. On the other side of the bar was a 3000 square foot garden patio that left both Todd and I salivating.
At six we drove over to Todd’s to pick up his wife, Rosie, as well as some beer for our dinner. Larry, the beverage manager at the Ravenous Pig, had agreed to let us bring our own bottles as long as we shared. Todd showed me his home office - one wall was stacked with wine he was aging, and the other contained his collection of vintage beers. In the middle of this incredible display was a desk with a computer on it. Talk about inspiration. Or temptation - probably both. And this was just his personal stash. Back at the Abbey, he had rented a nearby apartment now stacked with cases of aging beer. In a couple of years, he’ll have one of the best vintage lists in the country.
He began pulling bottles off the shelf, asking if I’d tried such and such before. If I hadn’t, it went into a cooler with wheels on it. In high school, Todd must have been voted “Most Likely to Be Prepared.” I added the Weeping Radish Christmas, as well as some tripel from the Mash House.
The two month old Ravenous Pig, located in Winter Park, was opened by a couple of chefs who met and got married while they were studying at the Culinary Institute of America. Though they both wound up part of the fine dining scene - she as the Waldorf - they really loved the Spotted Pig in the West Village. Eventually, after moving to central Florida, they created their own gastropub, with a menu heavy on meats - they do an incredible roast suckling pig - backed by an extensive beer selection.
Brent and Troy, along with their girlfriends, were already at the table when we arrived. Larry gave us a brief history of the place, then started bringing our beers out one by one, along with plates of food. Since there were eight of us, we tried just about everything on the menu. I hate to say this, but I’ve forgotten many of the beers we had, probably because we had so many. I remember the New Glarus Enigma, Surly Brown, Bison Farmhouse, a Binchoise, some Polish mead, a Belgian apricot beer with a pink label, along with at least a half dozen others. It was an all star lineup, and the food - flatiron steak, suckling pig, venison, rib eye, shrimp and grits, roasted quail, house-made sausage, and all the desserts - was up to it. Definitely one of the finest meals of the trip.
Iris and I didn’t want to leave the Ravenous Pig because we knew when we did, we’d be that much closer to abandoning our new friends and moving on to Tampa. Todd is a big fan of Ommegang, and I told him we all had to go to their festival in July so we could hang out again. If that was too far, I suggested the Carolina Beer Championships in April. And if that didn’t work out, well, Iris and I would do our trip all over again...in warmer weather.
As we said our goodbyes, I realized central Florida now has great beer, and great places to enjoy it. Even more important, the people behind this up and coming scene know how to take care of each other, as well as the people who visit.
Tuesday
January 1st
Deland, Florida
It had been ten days since I’d been to a discriminating establishment, so I was looking forward to the Abbey in Deland, Florida, located just down the road from Daytona Beach, the most hallowed ground in Nascar Nation. In this neck of the woods, you wouldn’t expect to find a Belgian beer bar with Duchess de Borgogne on draft (along with 14 other options) or the Madrugada Obscura in bottle (just the tip of a list that includes 14 Trappistes and about 90 other quality choices). You also wouldn’t expect to find a large wine list, panini sandwiches, and dark velvet couches.
The man behind this operation is Todd Carpenter, and if you read the mission statement on his web site, you realize he’s committed. Or about to be. According to his signed statement, the Abbey’s purpose is “to promote and support those who seek enjoyment from or through their consumption of food, wine, and beer...To help them to enrich this side of their lives in an affordable and value-driven manner.” The typical Nascar fan probably hasn’t read Todd’s mission statement, or they might have enjoyed running over him a few times for implying their lives needed affordable improvement.
“I didn’t really think about how crazy I was when I opened the place,” Todd said. Then he laughed. “Now I think about it all the time.”
Iris and I arrived at the Abbey unannounced on New Year’s day. I had sent an e-mail telling Todd about our trip, but hadn’t heard back, so I wasn’t expecting to see him. Rip, the bartender and Todd’s nephew, said his uncle might be stopping by soon. In the mean time, he asked if we had tried Ommegang’s Chocolate Indulgence. We hadn’t so he opened a bottle. We also ordered the smoked turkey pesto sandwich, the grilled ramen noodles, along with the hummus plate.
We were enjoying the food and our second bottle of the evening, the Saison Athene from St. Somewhere, when Todd came through the door. Rip sent him over and we introduced ourselves. He had read my e-mail so I didn’t have to explain what we were doing there. I told him how unexpected the Abbey was, with its motto of “Noteworthy Wine and Adventurous Beer.”
Todd said, “When we opened, people didn’t know what to make of all the special beers we had. They’d pull me aside and ask if we had anything a little less adventurous.”
While we were finishing up our food, he asked if we had ever been to the Red Light Red Light over in Winter Park. I said no, this was our first time in the area and I’d never even heard of it. He looked at his watch.
“I’ve got a turducken in the oven. How about I meet you back here in an hour and a half and I’ll take you. It’s kind of hard to find if you’ve never been there.”
I hadn’t even finished my second beer, and Todd was already offering me a ride to see someone else’s place. In the two days I spent in Deland, those were the only beers I had at the Abbey. Todd didn’t care. He was focused on making sure I had a great time.
After Todd had polished off his turducken (and I’d dropped off Iris at the Clark Family Campground, saying I’d be gone for a couple hours at the most), we made the forty minute drive down to Winter Park. Along the way, Todd called Brent Hernandez, the owner of Red Light Red Light. Brent was enjoying a rare night off, but said he would meet us there.
“Brent keeps his prices really low because he wants to make sure everyone can afford great beer,” Todd explained. “Unfortunately, that means the bar doesn’t make as much, so he survives off his tips.”
Using his cell phone again, Todd called Troy Barfoot, who works for Micro Man, the distributor responsible for most of the great craft beer in Florida. Five guys cover the whole state, and Troy is one of them.
“I’d never say it to Troy’s face, but he’s one of the main reasons there’s so much great beer in central Florida,” Todd said.
Finally putting away his phone, Todd told me about himself. An army brat, he was born in Japan but grew up in the States. After college, he got his masters in Hotel and Restaurant Management at Cornell, where one of his professors told him the most important thing was making an emotional connection with his customers. If he could do that, everything else would fall into place. Not surprisingly, Todd is a big fan of restauranteur Danny Meyer, the man who turned customer relations into an art form.
The more we talked, the more it seemed like Todd didn’t think it really mattered where the Abbey was located, as long as he kept providing his customers with positive emotional experiences, making them feel better about themselves in the process. I certainly felt better, though I had no idea where I was or where I was going. It didn’t matter. I knew Todd would support my enjoyment. What I didn’t expect was that he would do it until three in the morning, or that we’d put over 100 miles on his Camry that night.
He was right about the Red Light Red Light. It was hard to find. Lurking between a fancy bakery and an even fancier, French restaurant, was a well worn door with the word “Bar” scrawled above it. Other than that there wasn’t even a hint of what was waiting at the top of the stairs. Climbing the steps, I left the monied world of Winter Park behind, and entered the dim, reddish domain of Brent Hernandez.
Brent’s home away from home was once a dorm for servants. Now it’s a classic dive that made me nostalgic for the old Blind Tiger. The interior isn’t designed to elevate your senses. It’s more about keeping you focused on the real reason you’re there: the 70 bottles overflowing the shelves behind the bar; as well as the seven rotating taps - and a hand-drawn cask - all carefully chosen by Brent. He won’t let you drink anything he wouldn’t want himself, and he has great taste. We started with a pint of Shipyard from the hand pump. I’m not a big fan of Shipyard - they use the dreaded Ringwood yeast - but the porter we had was good - nicely conditioned and served at the perfect temperature.
As we were finishing up our pints, Brent showed up. Moments later, he was opening special bottles for us to try. I enjoyed St. Somewhere’s other beer, Lectio Divina, a Belgian-style amber, and then tried the Holy Mackerel, a Belgian-style golden ale also made in Florida. Todd and Brent are big fans of both St. Somewhere and Holy Mackerel as proof that Florida’s brewers are capable of making great beer.
Troy Barfoot joined us just as Brent was breaking out some of his home-brew, a weiss beer made with purred watermelon. Though it didn’t sound very promising, I wound up impressed. Todd told me Brent had also made an incredible kumquat beer. It kind of made sense that a Florida home brewer would look at tropical fruit and think, “What the hell,” before tossing it into his fermenter.
Todd was in the bathroom, so I told Troy his friend thought he was one of the main forces behind craft beer in central Florida. Troy laughed in surprise. I said I was surprised to find a place like the Abbey so close to Daytona Speedway.
“When he placed his first order, and he said he wanted over fifty cases of specialty beer, I tried to talk him out of it,” Troy said. “But he wouldn’t listen. It turned out he was right.”
Todd wandered back. He, Troy, and Brent started talking about the other places I had to check out before I left. A new restaurant, The Ravenous Pig, was number one on the list, and we all agreed to meet there the following night. The next thing I knew, Todd was ushering me out the door, and Brent was handing me a bottle of the Bison Farmhouse Ale - I’d told him I’d never had it - before sending me on my way.
Todd and I sped off, heading back towards Deland. I thought we were done for the night, until we shot past our exit and continued towards the coast. My phone went off - it was a text message from Iris, wondering where the hell I was. It was already midnight. I wrote back that I didn’t know, and I wasn’t in control of the situation. I also said I might be a little longer than originally planned. A half hour later we pulled up at Tir Na Nog, an Irish bar in the shadow of Daytona Speedway. Todd said they had a great beer list. Unfortunately, they were closed, so Todd made a couple more quick turns through the deserted streets of Daytona, until we pulled up in front of another Irish place, owned by Robbie McConnell.
They also had a great beer list, which I slowly worked my way through. I think I had a Bell’s Batch 8000, and some Belgian beer. Then I ordered a Sierra Celebration, to cleanse my palate for the ride home. Somehow Todd got me back to Deland. As I was leaving him, he was still making plans, telling me to meet him at the Abbey at 3pm the next day, so he could take me over to Knightly Liquors, a great beer store.
I think Todd would have taken me right then and there but they weren’t open. Luckily nothing was, so he let me go home.
Monday
December 31st
Still in Jacksonville, Florida
Our bathroom is beginning to smell like a swamp. Iris noticed it first. I told her either the heat and humidity were having a bad effect on our blackwater tank, or the foul smell was coming up through our sewer hose, from the Flamingo Lake cesspool. We flushed a deodorant grenade into the tank and hoped for the best.
When I bought some ice at the front desk, the man asked if we were going to the Flamingo Lake New Year’s Eve party that night, over the recreation hall. Tickets were only $7, which included a band. I told him we’d have to think about it. I hadn’t seen anyone under the age of 60 in the campground, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to ring in the new year with a couple hundred grandparents.
Iris and I went back to Apple and it was still packed. Bob, our salesman, was yet another grandfather in his sixties. He had started working for Apple after retiring from a sales job. He and his coworkers were crowing about Apple stock hitting $200. It turned out Bob had bought hundreds of Apple shares at $25, and was now waiting for it to split. He also had a 100 shares of Google. He was thinking of getting into Dell and some of the other technology stocks because his broker said they were about to take off again, “but they’ve been saying that since the crash,” Bob said, laughing.
I took my Macbook, along with my old laptop, over to Sprint. Ray, a salesman there, had said I could use their wifi to transfer all the stuff from my old computer onto the new one. I also wanted an aircard and Ray said he would download the software and set it up for me. The transfer took about an hour. While we waited, Ray told me about his family over in Karachi, Pakistan. The whole city was shut down after Bhutto’s assassination. When I asked if he was worried about what might happen, he laughed and said it was always like that in Pakistan. Ray was majoring in micro-finance at a local college. He wanted to eventually help third world countries, as long as he didn’t have to live there.
Leaving Sprint with a new computer and an air card, I felt like I had finally solved at least some of my telecommunication problems. Hungry we headed for the Cheesecake Factory, one of Iris’s favorite mall restaurants. Unfortunately there was an hour wait. Instead we wound up at an Italian restaurant chain. They were blowing up balloons for the party that night, and all the bartenders were already wearing their party hats. When I asked if they had any craft beer the guy gave us the local mantra - “Bass, Guinness, Stella, and Peroni...”
Later that night, while Iris cleared five years worth of debris out my old computer, I kicked back on my concrete patio. Opening one of Zach Hart’s year old tripels, I toasted the new year. That beer was followed by a 60 minute IPA, then a Duckrabbit Baltic porter. Feeling lonely, I opened my phone and started calling people. Nobody picked up so I left messages, trying not to sound too desperate. Tom Baker called back. He sounded exhausted from the build-out on his new brewpub, though he said people had been coming down to help with the work. I really wished I’d been able to chip in.
What the hell was I doing starting off a brand new year in Jacksonville, anyway?
Sunday
December 30th
Jacksonville, Florida
We went to the Ragtime Brewery down at the beach, a brewpub now owned by Gordon Biersch. Featuring a large bar and brew house on the left, a dining room in the middle, and another bar down at the other end, the handful of people inside had plenty of room to spread out. Opting for the bar in the brew house, we sat down and examined our menus. Only a couple of people were drinking beer. The rest were having cocktails, or taking advantage of the “Build Your Own Bloody Mary” Special they were running in the other bar.
Iris ordered the sampler, while I asked for the seasonal reserve - a pale ale. It’s time to get a new brewer when the pale ale is your special reserve and all the customers are building Bloodys. Judging by the thinness of the beer, it might not have been all the brewer’s fault. Maybe Gordon Biersch had seen their malt and hop bills and decided to focus on making craft water instead.
We left the Ragtime and headed for the beach, where a couple were tossing bread crumbs to the seagulls. They were surrounded by hundreds of birds, all of them swooping in for the free handouts. It looked like a dangerous way to spend your Sunday. Iris, who has a phobia about birds, freaked out and ran off the beach. I took a couple of pictures and followed after her.
I found her in what must be one of the last independent bookstores in Florida. The new translation of War and Peace was in the front window. I’d heard about it on NPR - it was supposed to be much better than the one I’d read ten years earlier. The translation I read had been one of the greatest soap operas of all time. Clocking in at 1215 pages, I figured this trip might be the perfect time to reread the world’s longest book.
Driving to the other end of the spectrum, we visited one of the biggest malls I’ve ever seen. With its carefully landscaped streets and hundreds of stores and restaurants, it felt like a small village. The only thing missing were the homes.
We parked near the Apple store. Iris and I had been fighting over the computer, so we were thinking of getting a second one. Mine was old, and the screen was cracked (I had left it in the trailer’s desk drawer between Savannah and Jekyll Island, and it had wound up down by the bed). Still, the only way I could justify spending the money was by telling Iris she could have my old computer, while her niece and sister would get the two computers we had at home.
This was fairly complex rationalization, so I decided to think about it over night.
Saturday
December 29th
Jacksonville, Florida
Arrived at our first Florida campground, the Flamingo Lake RV Resort. Just down the road from the largest nuclear power plant I’ve ever seen, with clouds of steam billowing out of the two concrete stacks. It was a nice change - RV parks are usually located under high tension lines, beside power plants, or downstream from sewage treatment facilities. Flamingo Lake had paved sites with concrete patios, so it felt like we were tailgating at Walmart. They did have a lake with a small sandy beach. It was about 80 degrees, so Iris and I walked over, hoping to catch some sun. We were both pretty pale beneath our winter clothing. As soon as we got comfortable on our chaise lounges, the sky filled with clouds. Were they coming from the nuclear reactor? We decided to do some food shopping instead.
The closest market was a Walmart superstore. I was right, our campground was like one of their parking lots, except the blacktop at Walmart was nicer. You can camp at Walmart. Wanting to encourage business from RVr’s, they’ve got hookups in the parking lot. The supermarket inside looked like it had been built in the 1950’s, when preservatives were good for you. But everything was cheap. If you didn’t mind out of date food, you could eat pretty well. We really wanted to grill some fish but it appeared to have been in the back of someone’s freezer for a long long time. The bottled water looked good, and I found some heavy duty aluminum foil at a great price.
We decided to make pasta.
Friday
December 28th
Jekyll Island, Georgia
Have you ever wondered what the Vanderbilts and the
Rockefellers did during those cold Fifth Avenue
winters? I always knew about their summers in Newport,
but what happened when the snow came and the wind
blew? Did they put on long johns and drink more barley
wine like you’re probably doing? No, they got the hell
out of the city and headed south to Jekyll Island off
the coast of Georgia. Having spent a few late December
days here, I can tell you William Rockefeller was not
only very rich, he was smart too, even if he did call
his 12,000 square foot winter home a “cottage.”
From 1886 until it closed in 1942, Jekyll Island
was the richest club in the world. When the membership
gathered in the Grand Dining room for dinner, they
represented an estimated 1/6 of the world’s wealth.
During the financial panic of 1907, J. P. Morgan held
secret meetings on Jekyll Island, in which he and
other prominent members wrote the legal framework for
what eventually became the Federal Reserve.
It all started back in 1879, when Newton Finney and
John DuBignon came up with a crazy idea. A member of
the Union Club in New York City, Finney had access to
people in high places. DuBignon owned a mostly
deserted island in Georgia. There idea was to set up
Jekyll as an exclusive hunting club, and sell
memberships to rich northern suckers. The plan worked
better than either developer could have imagined, as
DuBignon wound up selling his island to the newly
incorporated Jekyll Island Club for a huge profit.
The members broke ground on their Clubhouse in
1886. Designed by Charles Alexander, it featured an
impressive turret and 93 fireplaces. Two years later,
the doors opened for their first winter season, and
the competition began as to who would arrive in the
biggest yacht. Most of the their ships were so big
they didn'’t fit in the harbor, and had to be anchored
in the Atlantic instead.
Later, the members competed over who could build
the most expensive “cottage” adjacent to the
clubhouse. Many of these homes are still standing, and
two of them are part of the Jekyll Island Clubhouse
Hotel, now open to the likes of you and me. Fully
restored to its former splendor, you can stay in one
of the 53 rooms, or you can park in the campground
like we did and simply hang out at the hotel. This way
is much cheaper. They have free wifi in the cafe, and
Terrapin Rye Pale Ale on draft in the bar.
Riddled with bike trails, Jekyll Island has 10
miles of Atlantic beach, three 18 hole golf courses,
plus the 9 hole course built for the original members,
and great fishing. Somehow the modern developers have
left Jekyll alone, so it still feels, and looks,
exactly as it did when America’s aristocracy had it
all to themselves. Iris decided it was the perfect
place for a wedding - yikes!!!
We both agreed it was our favorite place so far.
Tuesday
December 25th
Savannah, Georgia
If you ever find yourself spending Christmas at the
Savannah Oaks Campground - and, even if I don’'t like
you, I hope you don'’t - take solace in the fact that
you have most likely hit bottom, at least as far as
campgrounds are concerned, and you can only go up from
here.
I hate to admit it, but we stayed at Savannah Oaks
because of its ad. You’'d think I would have learned by
now, having authored a few print campaigns myself. I
remember once claiming the old Blind Tiger was the
“top potato chip bar in the country.” Granted, we had
about ten different kinds of chips, but were we the
best? I don’'t think so. And even if we were the best,
so what? I mean, which demographic was I appealing to?
In hindsight, I was probably going after the kind of
person who would enjoy spending his holidays at the
Savannah Oaks. The place was fairly crowded, though
many of the trailers looked like they’d be spending
Christmas here forever.
According to the ad I fell for, Savannah Oaks has a
new pier and floating dock. I’d like to see the dock
that can float without any water under it. The only
liquid I saw was falling from the sky. So you might
want to take the “Great Fishing!” with a grain of
salt. If you can find their swimming pool you'’ve got
better eyes than mine. The campground did have a lot
of oak trees. Unfortunately they were shedding, so we
spent a lot of our time dodging acorns. The squirrels
really enjoyed using our trailer to break open the
toughest shells. They did have free wifi, but it only
worked in the office, which didn’t have any chairs.
Try typing an e-mail while standing up and holding
your computer.
We didn'’t have much more luck with Savannah either.
Maybe it was the pall cast by our accommodations, but
the city made famous by “Midnight in the Garden of
Good and Evil” was, for us, mostly the latter. The
Moon River brewpub suffered from a bad case of
“same-itis,” with every beer, no matter what the
color, finishing exactly the same. Except for the
triple. Made with Dixie Crystal sugar, it had rock
candy flavors up front, in the middle, and at the end.
The food, typical pub fare, all looked, and probably
tasted, like chicken.
Savannah, like a southern bell, was beautiful to
look at, with her lush green squares overflowing with
ancient trees, all of them loaded down with armfuls of
Spanish moss. The historic district had many great
restaurants, but Christmas was not the time to visit
them. Most of them closed for the holidays, which
explained why the city was deserted. All except Lady
and Sons, the restaurant owned by Paula Deen of Food
Network fame. Her place had a line so long we could
only peer in the windows, staring at one of the most
famous all-you-can-eat cafeteria buffets in the world.
So close yet so far.
Brewer Tim Wilson had much better luck during his
time in Savannah. He and his wife Sally owned the
Norwich Inn up in Vermont - Tim made the beer for
their restaurant and pub - until they sold it last
fall and went on the road in an RV, just like us.
Here’s what Tim had to say about Georgia’s “first
city”:
“We were in Savannah for 3 days and of course I
researched the food scene thoroughly. Too many
restaurants, too little time, but I can heartily
recommend four. First was Elizabeth on 37th - we had
an outstanding meal in this gracious old Victorian
mansion. The restaurant is legendary for their
regional specialties, but gives them their own twist.
“The Old Pink House was also in contention for our
finest meal in Savannah. One of the city’s oldest
homes, it was built in 1771, and in April, when we
were there, it was undergoing a tasteful expansion
into an old building next door. Elegant without
pretense, seafood is their specialty.
“The Crab Shack, on Tybee Island, a 20 minute ride
from downtown, is loved by locals and tourists alike.
Think Jimmy Buffet meets Gilligan's Island. You may
recall the photos of Sal with the stuffed gator, and
you can feed, poke and generally annoy the gators as
you wait for your table.
“Mrs. Wilkes' Dining Room has been a mecca of down
home southern cooking for about 60 years. Dinner is
served family style and about 20 different dishes were
passed around, including some truly righteous fried
chicken and a fine version of the local gumbo. As
always in the South, the many vegetable dishes make
the meal. Truly memorable.”
Tim also said Churchill's Pub, next door to Moon
River, had a good beer list. And lest you think he
loved everything about Savannah, here are his remarks
about a famous barbecue joint: “Johnny Harris, opened
in 1924, is long past its prime. The old dining room
was interesting, but the food was pretty sad. Riding
their reputation to the bottom.”
He probably would have said something similar about
our campground. Iris and I made the best of it,
however. After being turned away by Savannah’s food
establishments, we created our own feast. I dug a
shallow hole in the sand and set up the grill for some
beer can chicken, which I’d never done before. Shoving
our 5 lb roaster down onto a can of Weeping Radish
Christmas Ale, I discovered a chicken is a lot taller
when it’s sitting up straight. The grill lid wouldn’t
fit over it. Under pressure and not thinking too
clearly, I duct taped some aluminum foil over the
large gap.
While the bird cooked, I called my family. There
wasn’t much reception, but I was able to get through
long enough to say hello. The moment I tried to tell
them about Savannah Oaks, however, the line went dead.
This happened three times, until I finally gave up. I
walked all over the park looking for a better signal,
with no luck. Our campground appeared to be in lock
down mode.
Returning to the grill, I discovered the duct tape
had melted and the foil had blown away, revealing a
blackened chicken sitting in the lotus position.
Apparently my traveling grill was a bit too small for
indirect cooking. In an attempt at resuscitation, I
poured more beer down the bird’s parched neck. Steam
escaped from every orifice. Our chicken drained a
bottle of Dogfish Head Raison followed by another of
Duckrabbit Milk Stout. I’m still not sure where all
the beer went. All I know is our Christmas dinner
drank more beer than I did.
We managed to salvage our first, and hopefully
last, Christmas in Savannah. The chicken’s legs tasted
pretty good, and Iris made some excellent side
dishes. As Tim said, southern cooking is really about
the vegetables.
Saturday & Sunday
December 21st & 22nd
Beaufort, S. C.
Brewer's Brewing, the new brewpub in Beaufort, South Carolina, is
about as ecologically "green" as a business can be, right down to the
environmentally friendly sage green paint brushed onto its walls. Josh
Brewer, the owner and, yes, brewer - how could he have become anything
else - didn't want a typical brewpub.
"I couldn't just open the doors and say, here's a bunch of beer
and food and that's it. We wanted our place to be more than that."
First and foremost, Josh, and his wife Alexia,
wanted sustainable design elements their customers could see, touch
and, most importantly, appreciate. The finished concrete used in the
floor, bar, and bathrooms, is 100% green, with recycled glass and
oyster shells thrown into the mix. The bathroom partitions are made out
of recycled plastic. In the dining area, the table tops are Dakota
Burl, a bio-based material derived from agricultural fiber and
sunflower hulls. The space is lit with compact fluorescent lights
linked to a Lutron dimming system.
Brewer's Brewing is also incredibly efficient. Josh installed a
Premier Stainless brewing system, with a malt utilization rate over
80%, one of the best in the business. He spent $8000 on the worlds most
efficient water heater. The men?s room has a no flush urinal that saves
about 40,000 gallons of water a year. All three of the sit-down toilets
have high efficiency valves: push the flush handle up for liquid waste
and down for solids (I'm not sure what happens if you have too many
beers and push the flush up after doing number two).
I hate to bring up the paint again, but it's Sherman Williams
Harmony Sure Green, with no volatile organic compounds. Oh yeah, and
Josh rides his bike to work every day, even in December. I saw him
arrive as I was climbing out of my gas guzzling Toyota Tundra.
Impressed? You're not the only one. Last year, while they were
still working on their business plan, Josh and Alexia entered Wiley
Publishing's "What Dream is Brewing in You?" Contest, run as a
promotion for Sam Calagione's book, "Brewing Up a Business." On
Christmas day, they put together a video for You Tube. When they
qualified as a finalist, they sent in their finished business plan.
Their idea took the top prize.
"I'm not the excitable type, but when we won I was overwhelmed,"
Josh said. "Winning that contest made us feel like we really had a
concept that would work."
The grand prize was $10,000 in seed money, and a weekend with
Sam Calagione. For Josh the money was great, but getting to pick Sam's
brain for a couple of days was the best part.
"Sam spent a lot of time with us, going through our business plan, giving us advice," Josh said. "It was really invaluable."
The winning concept wasn't just about sustainability - Josh wanted
a brewpub that was an important part his community. He and Alexia both
came from small towns - he's from outside Chicago, she's from upstate
New York - and they loved Beaufort's intimacy, as well as its support
for all things local (When Starbucks tried to open a store here, the
town refused to allow it). At the same time, Beaufort's well-preserved
downtown, along with its waterfront location, has drawn a lot of new
residents to the area, which was good - Josh wanted a new look for his
brewpub, something as far from an English pub as possible.
"I wanted something contemporary, but not too high end," Josh said. "A place with clean lines and no clutter."
To strengthen his ties with the community, Josh has local artists
hanging on his walls, and he plans to do book readings. The Beaufort
Chamber of Commerce wants to meet here, while the local home brewers
club already does. I met some of the members, who had the dazed look of
someone in love. Though Brewer's Brewing is only a week old, many of
the people at the bar had already joined the mug club, and were
drinking out of Josh's clean cut 22 oz. glasses. No dimpled mugs for
him.
There was one English element in Brewer?s Brewing, however: cask
beer. We happened to arrive on Firkin Friday (the first one as a matter
of fact) about a half hour after Josh tapped a cask of his dry hopped
pale ale. I hadn?t tasted cask beer since Dave Wollner's Commemorative
IPA up in Willimantic. Josh's was so good I had two. As far as anyone
knew, the next closest hand pump was a couple hundred miles away.
"I always promised myself that if I ever opened a brewpub it would have cask beer," Josh said. "It was an absolute must."
Along with the hand pump, he had three other house beers on
draught: the pale ale, a golden light, and the porter. Eventually,
he'll have four staples - an IPA, a Belgian wit, the pale ale, and
porter, and two that rotate. He says none of them will be too whacky,
except maybe the cask.
"Cask is where I have fun," he said. "Next week it'll be the
porter with some Kona coffee beans in it. And the week after that I'll
do the pale ale with some juniper berries. I'll probably be fairly
conservative with the staple beers, though there?s an oatmeal Imperial
IPA I'd love to make - it comes in about 9.5%. In the spring I'll start
getting into the higher gravity beers. I did some barrel oak-aged
porter when I worked down at Moon River in Savannah, and I'd like to
get a few barrels of my own and do some aging on wood for 12 months or
so."
As I ordered the porter, ready for something dark, Josh explained how he wound up in Beaufort.
"I grew up outside Chicago, and I got my first brewing job at a
brewpub in Barrington. Actually, I started out as a volunteer, and
worked my way up to part time. Then I got a job making wine for a guy
down in Belize, on the island of Ambergris Caye."
I almost coughed up some of his porter, which would have been a shame because it was really good.
"You're kidding," I said.
He wasn't. I told him about the bar we had bought down on
Ambergris Caye, which we had finally managed to sell the day before we
arrived in Beaufort. In fact, I was celebrating, so I ordered another
pint of the cask. I had a feeling I wouldn't be seeing too many hand
pumps in Florida.
It turned out Josh had worked for Glenn at the Rendezvous
Restaurant on Ambergris, making some of the worst wine in the history
of the western world. I remembered Glenn telling me how he had wanted
to set up a brewery - he'd even brought in a brewer - until Barry
Bowen, who had a monopoly on the beer business in Belize, had frowned
upon the idea. When Barry frowned, everyone involved was immediately
sorry.
Josh was the brewer Glenn had hired. He stayed in Belize for a
year and a half, making wine and working as a captain on the island
ferry. Whenever his name came up on a list and immigration started
searching for him - you're not supposed to work in Belize without a
permit - he dropped out of sight for a couple of months.
Dodging the cops got old after a while. He also missed brewing.
It was time to leave "paradise" and head north, but not back to
Chicago. He wanted to brew somewhere warm. He remembered his mom
bringing a pint glass back from a brewpub in Hilton Head. He called
them on a whim and it turned out they had just started looking for a
head brewer (the brewpub in Hilton Head is almost always looking for a
head brewer). He was working there a couple weeks later, until he
begged his way into Moon River, where the head brewer, now owner,
taught him a lot about brewing.
Then he and Alexia moved to Hawaii for a while (they built up a
tour business and sold it for a pile of money), fulfilling another
dream, before coming back to Beaufort.
"We missed the small town life here," Josh said. Judging by the
crowd lining the 100 foot wraparound bar, the people of Beaufort are
glad he's back. And not just because he's making great beer.
"The customers have been very happy with the food too," Josh
said. "It's just as important to us as the beer. We interviewed 15
chefs before settling on Dan. He said he'd give us 5-10 years before
retiring. This is his last job in the food business."
Dan's going out with a bang. His pork chops were the best I ever
had - beautifully moist, with plenty of flavor. It was so succulent,
Iris thought it was undercooked. Cinnamon really loved the bones that
came with it, probably because Josh's meat is all grass fed and
hormone-free. Chef Dan is also part of Sustainable Seafood, and goes
down to the docks every week for all his fish.
"I remember Sam Calagione saying we needed to set ourselves
apart," Josh said. "For us it's the green aspect, the colors of the
place, the design, the food, the local art on the walls."
Josh's dream had come true. He hadn't built anything even
remotely resembling a typical brewpub. Nor was it in any way English,
except for the cask beer.
"I had a woman come up to me and say she'd been here for three
hours, and she forgot she was in Beaufort," Josh said. "That was my
goal - to lift people out of their environment and put them in mine."
Tuesday
December 18thNorth Charleston, South Carolina Have you ever wanted your own a craft brewery? Have you wanted it bad enough to get up at 4 a.m., go to your paying job brewing for someone else, then jump in your car and head over to your own brewery until nine p.m., sometimes as late as midnight, before pulling down the mattress leaning against the wall and passing out in your fifty-five degree warehouse? How about working seven days a week - on weekends you get to spend all your time at your own brewery - to the point where your two boys, whenever they have a question, have to preface it by saying, “Hey mom, if you see dad this week, could you ask him...” Dave Merritt wanted his own brewery that bad, and when Coast Brewing fired up its biodiesel brewhouse at the old Navy Base in North Charleston late one afternoon in mid September, he finally got it. He sold his first batches of beer - a German-style Kolsch, an IPA, and a chocolate rye - in October, and he’s been double-shifting it ever since. He’s not the only one pulling doubles. His wife and partner, Jaime Tenney, formerly of New Jersey, works at a biodiesel company during the day, while running the business side of Coast in the evenings. She also takes care of their two boys, and runs their homebrew shop. I think that adds up to six jobs between the two of them. Dave and Jaime have always been single-minded. They met during their senior year of high school, when Jaime moved from New Jersey down to Mt. Pleasant, outside Charleston. Dave didn’t waste time, hitting on her during homeroom on the first day of classes. Jaime thought he was some sort of crazy southerner and told him to “Fuck off!” Dave was crazy enough not to give up. When Jaime got a job at an organic bakery, so did he. When she moved to the health food store next door, Dave stayed at the bakery, but continued to work on her. Jaime finally agreed to go out with him during their freshman year at the College of Charleston. They were both 19, and Dave had recently been given his first homebrew kit as a Christmas gift. A year later, they were married, and Jaime became pregnant. This was when Dave decided to get serious about his life. At least that’s what he thought he was doing when he left college and his pregnant wife, got on a bus, and headed off to brewing school in California. Everyone else thought he was even crazier than before. He and Jaime were flat broke with a child on the way. But by the time Dave finished making his second batch of home brew, he knew he’d found his calling. The California brewing program was supposed to be six months, including a two month internship, but Dave decided he’d just do the four months of classes and then get a job, so they could make some money. “I told him that was a pretty good idea,” Jaime said. When Dave returned to Charleston in 1998, he got a job as an assistant brewer, making $4.85 an hour at the Southend Brewpub. They had recently won a silver at the GABF, and the head brewer was as crazy about brewing as Dave was. They had 10 to 13 beers on draught at any one time, plus the numerous batches they were homebrewing on kits upstairs. But the owner of Southend wanted to cut back on his expenses, so Dave got a job at Palmetto, his first production brewery. “I went from getting beer into serving tanks, to getting bottles and kegs out the door, and using tighter filters to prolong shelf life. I learned about distribution, and what it’s like to be separated from the customer, who became this mysterious person you didn’t ever see. On the one hand it was kind of good to get away from the restaurant side, but I lost all the fun stuff of making any kind of beer I wanted. At Palmetto the owners decide what we brew, and we only do four beers.” He paused, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just said. “Those are the only four beers we make. We don’t even do a seasonal.” The craft beer scene in South Carolina is still in its infancy, and Palmetto has done well to survive. The owners have taken a cautious route, expanding very slowly, always making sure they have enough beer to keep the distributor happy - you can’t sell your own beer in South Carolina, so if you lose you’re distributor, you’re out of business - but not so much that they can’t sell it. In the past year, however, the market has begun to change - same as in North Carolina - and demand for full flavored, wide ranging styles has begun to grow. Les Addis, the distributor of Coast Brewing, says there are a lot more restaurants looking for high gravity beer. He thinks craft beer in the Charleston area is about to explode, so much so he recently started Gravity Distribution, with Coast has his first - and so far only - customer. As he struggles to get his business off the ground, he’s also working two jobs - or he was until this week - and so’s his wife Laura, a graphic designer for a restaurant group. “We now have restaurants building their business models around their beer lists,” Les said. “And there are a lot of high end places that want to have a great local beer to go with their wine lists. Tourists want to drink something they can only get here.” Dave only kegs his beers at this point, and he can’t legally sell growlers out of his brewery, so the only way you can drink his beer is at one of the bars or restaurants in the Charleston area. So, after sampling his Kolsch, IPA, and chocolate rye, as well as his newest beer, a dangerously drinkable Imperial Stout - it clocks in at over 9% - we all headed over to EVO, the first restaurant to carry Coast Beer. EVO (Extra Virgin Oven) is a high end pizza place with a gourmet list of beers. A big supporter of Dave and Jaime, they had all their beers on draught and are already clamoring for more of the chocolate rye, which is almost gone. Dave can only do three beers at a time, so the Kolsch and IPA will be his standards - he sees the easy drinking but beautifully clean Kolsch as his session beer, and the 7.7% IPA as his go-to beer for Charleston’s beer geeks. The third fermenter will rotate, with something new following the Imperial stout. While eating the organic pizzas at EVO with Dave, Jaime, Les and Laura, I tried to explain what we were doing traveling around the country visiting great breweries. No matter how hard I tried, it didn’t really sound like a job, let alone two. Compared to the rest of the group, we were a couple of slackers. Still, with the Charleston market as conservative and traditional as it is, they’re going to need that kind of dedication. They know they’ve all got a hard road ahead of them, but they’re excited to finally be up and running. “I was planning on quitting my day job by the end of the year,” Dave said. “Now I’m thinking of January, and when that month is over, I’ll tell you I’m leaving in February. The truth is I don’t know how long I’ll have to keep this up. But I don’t mind. We’ve tried to do this three times, and it all finally fell into place. It’s what we always wanted. Actually, we wanted to open a farmhouse brewery. I had this dream of getting up in the morning and walking out my front door and into the brewery.” “That is what you’re doing,” Jaime reminded him. “We just don’t have the farm or the house.”
 SaturdayDecember 15thMurrells Inlet, South Carolina If you ever drive due south from Wilmington, and cross the border into South Carolina, do what Archer and Anna Huntington did back in the 1930’s: go right past Myrtle Beach. You’ll only be missing an all-you-can-eat buffet of miniature golf courses, par 3 pitch and putt courses, 18 hole golf courses, churches built to resemble golf clubhouses - imagine the poor slob who thinks he’s signing up for a tee time, and winds up hearing a sermon instead - and, of course, the usual strip clubs. This means you’ll miss the Liberty Steakhouse and Brewery, but don’t worry. We went there so you wouldn’t have to. So just keep going - don’t even stop for the cheap gas ($2.73 a gallon!) - until you’re in Murrells Inlet, ten miles south, one of those classic fishing villages that’s somehow survived the mall swallowing everything around it. Murrells Inlet is the self-proclaimed “Seafood Capital of South Carolina,” and it very well might be, with three seafood markets sprinkled amongst a gaunlet of fish shacks and oyster bars, all along a two mile stretch of road looking out over the water. We stopped at Harrelson’s to pick up some grouper and littlnecks, then went to the Hot Fish Club on the recomendation of the monger behind the counter. The Hot Fish was named after a group of plantation owners from nearbye All Saints Parish, who founded the original Hot & Hot Fish Club back in 1845. Their hideout was over on Drunken Jack’s Island - though it moved around a lot - where they used to cook up whatever they caught, drink lots of wine, and tell stories. They must have done more than that, or I doubt people would still be naming things after them. The new Hot Fish has a restaurant and gazebo bar, where all the wood has been carved up and initialed by everyone who’s ever been there, except us of course. We only stayed long enough for a Yeungling and a Blue Moon, the best we could do beer-wise (no one will ever be proclaiming this area a craft beer capital). Later, we found out the fish shack we should have checked out was Oliver’s Lodge, just down the road. It’s been around since 1910. In fact, it was probably the place to eat back in 1933, when Archer Huntington bought up the 9000 acres next door. Archer, who had inherited a Newport News shipping fortune, wanted to build a winter home where his wife could scupt - her work is in a couple hundred museums around the world - and he could write poetry. Obsessed with Spain from his travels there, his heart was set on a simple Moorish castle of about 20 thousand square feet; enough for the two of them, and 30 or 40 servants. His contractor must have been a saint, because Archer insisted on building without a blueprint, using all local labor. It was the Depression, and the area had been particularly hard hit by unemployment. Periodically, Archer would have large sections of the castle torn down, telling the contractor it didn’t match his “vision.” In this way, he kept a large portion of the local populace working while the hard times ran their course. Now the Huntington compound once known as Atlaya - it means “watchtower” in Spanish - is a state park. We camped there, and had most of the place to ourselves. We wandered the castle, and the long swath of untouched beach between Myrtle and Pawley’s Island. We finally broke out our folding bikes and rode around the nature refuge. Because of a bad storm, we didn’t make it across the street to Brookhaven Gardens, which contains hundreds of Anna’s metal sculptures, thought it’s apparently worth seeing, like the rest of the grounds. The whole area has been beautifully preserved, allowing you to experience South Carolina the way Archer and Anna did. However, if you do head for Murrells Inlet and Huntington Beach, I’ve got two more bits of advice: bring bug spray - despite the wet winter weather, Cinnamon - who had finally grown back some of his hair - was eaten alive, and now has the skin of an ostrich; and bring a cooler of beer. That way you can eat like a local, without having to drink like one.
 ThursdayDecember 13th We spent our second day in Wilmington repeating the first day. We did this for two reasons: it had been our most enjoyable afternoon since our bon voyage party; and secondly, we missed entering a place where everybody knew our name. When you’re moving from town to town, you’re always a stranger. We wanted familiar faces. We wanted to be a familiar face - or at least as familiar as someone can be after meeting only twice. The City Market came first, an enclosed bazaar that’s been operating since the 1800’s. We bought a wicker spice rack in the same shop we had purchased a metal pitcher the day before. The woman remembered us, and asked where we were from. She had just been to the post office, and it was empty. The clerk said it had been like that since Thanksgiving. No one seemed to be mailing presents this season. Maybe everyone finally got tired of sending each other the same gifts every year. Down the street, we again peeked into Barbary Coast, the oldest bar in Wilmington. A classic dive, the window read “We’ve upped our standards, so up yours!” Though it was two in the afternoon, Barbary was a lot busier than the post office. We had another lunch at Dock Street, a well worn oyster bar with tropical-colored tables and chairs. The bartender at Front Street had recommended it, saying they had great seafood. He was right. It was our best meal so far. The bartender there was glad to see us again, and asked if we lived in the area. When we said we were visiting from up north, she shivered. I ordered a dozen raw oysters ($11!), and the Buffalo Grouper Sandwich, same as the day before. Unfortunately, the Buffalo preparation had been a special, so I went with the blackened. It was just as good. The roll was light and dusted with cornmeal. The spices had amazing depth. The tarter sauce was light and refreshing. The oysters were big and clean, with plenty of brine. One of those rare occasions when a meal was better than you remembered. After lunch, we stopped at Front Street to see Kevin, the brewer. We were headed over to Cape Fear Wine & Beer, and asked if he wanted to come. He had taken us there yesterday, saying it was his favorite place for a beer. He was still working on a new batch of his Belgian pale ale, and said we should stop by later to give it a try. Maaike was still behind the bar at Cape Fear Wine and Beer, and she greeted us like we were long lost friends. Turns out she’s almost always there. As the majority owner, she does the day shift six or seven times a week. When she’s not behind the bar, she’s often on our side, hanging out with friends and customers. She helped us pick out beers from her overwhelming selection of over 300 bottles. The day before I’d had a Bell’s double cream stout. Maaike recommended the Kashmir double IPA from Highland, a brewery up in the mountains near Ashville. The fuschia label was one of the ugliest I’d seen, but the beer inside was delicious; beautifully balanced for an Imperial IPA. Even Iris liked it, and she’s not a big fan of heavily hopped beers. Maaike asked if we’d been to the Barbarry Coast yet. We told her we’d walked by it a couple of times, but hadn’t ventured inside. “It’s the oldest bar around here and a great dive,” she said. “It’s got a new manager who’s bringing in some great beers, so now it’s even better. He stops by here sometimes, so he can look over our cooler and pick my brain. You should check it out.” It seems like everyone along the Wilmington waterfront supports each other. The bartender at Front Street sent us over to Dock Street. Kevin took us to Cape Fear Wine and Beer, where Maaike steered us towards Barberry Coast. In other cities, people have a better developed sense of competition. Here it’s more laid back. They want you to have a good time, even if that means sending you down the road to someone elses place. Even in the winter, when customers are hard to come by. Everyone’s trying to help each other out. More unusual, they welcomed us into their group after meeting us once. That open-minded attitude had given us two of the best days we’d had in a long time. We said goodbye to Maaike, and headed back over to Front Street. Kevin and his girlfriend Hannah were perched at the bar, sampling the Belgian pale ale. Kevin quickly got us two glasses, and we all sat around talking about...well, I dont remember, but it didn’t matter. We were just hanging out, having a good time, like we had known each other forever. If we lived in Wilmington - and at that moment we wished we did - we would probably redo this day again. In fact, we’d keep doing it until it was perfect. With any luck, it never would be.
 WednesdayDecember 12 The beer scene in Wilmington, North Carolina, like the city itself, seems to be on the cusp. “Sometimes I feel like Wilmington is about to take off, and other days I think it’s going down the drain,” said Kevin Kosak, the brewer at Front Street, Wilmington’s only brewpub. Two years ago, when Kevin first arrived at Front Street, he mostly sold lager and raspberry wheat. His customers didn’t want anything else. Kevin didn’t mind. His mentors had always stressed making drinkable beers with no off flavors. Actually, Kevin enjoyed the challenge of German lagers. “There’s nothing to hide behind,” he said. “If you can make a good clean lager, you’re doing something right.” While other brewers jumped aboard the Imperial bandwagon, or explored the cobwebbed world of spontaneous fermentation, Kevin took pride in providing prime examples of a given style. Not that he had much choice, as most of his clientele were scared of anything that didn’t look like Bud. Kevin knew exactly where they were coming from. He’s from a coal mining town in eastern Pennsylvania, where Bud is still king. He got out of there fast, heading off to college. Afterwards, while getting ready for law school, he waited tables at Capitol City Brewing in Arlington, Virginia. “I got into brewing by mistake,” Kevin said. He had become friends with the head brewer, and when one of his assistants left, he asked Kevin if he wanted to give it a try. “He started me off cleaning kegs, delivering kegs, then cleaning more kegs,” Kevin recalled. “I loved it.” He was especially drawn to the camaraderie both at Capitol City and amongst the other brewers in the area. The whole scene drew him in, to the point where he was studying brewing during his off hours. He also bugged his boss with millions of questions. Kevin worked in Arlington for over two years, under three different brewers, each of them talented, and willing to help him learn. He eventually landed a headbrewing job in Leesburg, Virginia, where he made a lot of mistakes, and improved in the process. When the brewpub closed a year later, he was hired by Front Street. The owners had just finished a major renovation, and wanted a fresh face in the brewhouse. “I fell in love with this place immediately,” Kevin said. The Front Street building dates back to the Civil War, the only free standing structure in historic Wilmington, with alleys on both sides. He started working on his various lager recipes - in addition to the German pilsner on draught, he was also pouring a Keller beer - while slowly weaning his Wilmington clientele off the bland beers they were used to. He watched as his customer’s taste buds did an about face. “All of a sudden I was moving a lot of IPA,” he said. “Then my Scotch Ale became our best seller.” He also noticed local beer stores were improving their selection. Around the corner, Cape Wine and beer was selling 300 craft beers from all over the country. Now he carries four main beers - a German helles, a raspberry wheat, the Scotch Ale, and his IPA - and plays with the rest of his line-up, generally offering about eight styles at any one time. He loves making Belgian beers, though without wooden barrels he can’t do anything truly authentic. While we were there, he put on a nice Belgian pale ale, which followed up a citrusy Wit. He’s also been getting into organic beers, like the E.S.B. we tried, which was smooth and balanced. And he’s experimenting more. “I just did an 80 shilling where I didn’t use any caramel malt. Instead, I took the first runnings and caramelized them in the kettle, then boiled them down into a reduction and put the wort on top of that. You get caramel flavors, but they’re different than what you get from crystal malt. I love brewing stuff I haven’t done before. It keeps me on my toes.” So does the Carolina Beer Championships, which Kevin competes in every spring. The festival is run by Bobby Bush, and takes place in Hickory, about five hours away. “Bobby has a party for the brewers in his basement,” Kevin said. “I thought, you’re kidding me, the party’s in his basement? Then I got there, and he’s got a walk-in cooler bigger than mine at the brewery. He walked through it with us and said ‘don’t touch anything on that shelf, but you can have anything else.’” The Carolina Championships keeps the competition amongst North Carolina’s brewers friendly, while inspiring them to improve. “Since the state popped the cap on the 6% limit, we’re all doing a lot of different things,” Kevin said. “You look at Foothills Brewing in Winston-Salem, they’re bringing home medals left and right - that brings a lot of attention, and helps out the rest of us.” Back in Wilmington, the beer scene, and the city itself, is still very much a work in progress. During the summer months, when it’s hot and humid, the streets fill up with tourists thirsty for something light and refreshing. In the winter, Wilmington’s historic waterfront seems almost deserted. Kevin’s current customers are locals and college kids, most of them beer novices. He’s not complaining. And he doesn’t seem worried about which way Wilmington is headed. “They’ve been saying the same thing since I got here - some people thinks it’s too developed, others claim it’s dying. They’ll probably be saying it a 100 years from now.” In the meantime, he’ll keep brewing his clean, drinkable beers, going home to his girlfriend, Hannah, and his chocolate lab, Porter. Like the city he’s adopted, Kevin seems pretty comfortable with the way things are right now.
 MondayDecember 10 Our next stop was Fayetteville, North Carolina, home of the largest army base in America, Fort Bragg. We didn’t really want to visit Fayetteville. Thanks to the military’s influence, the area is notorious for its pawn shops, strip clubs, and all round seediness. But we’d heard good things about Zach Hart, the brewer at the Mash House, and we really wanted to check him out. After some research, I found a KOA campground close to Fayettville, but not too close. The place had received glowing reviews for its cleanliness and the quality of its facilities. We weren’t disappointed. The owner escorted us to our pull-through site in a white golf cart, over gravel so clean you could eat off it. Cinnamon did eat off it, a number of times, always with a surprised look on his face. While doing laundry, Iris dropped some clothes on the floor. The room was so spotless, she didn’t feel obligated to wash them again, as she usually does when something even momentarily glances off the floor. Our site had a full set of hook-ups, along with cable, free wifi, and excellent cell phone service. Even better, it was shorts and t-shirt weather, just as Zach had said it would be. Unfortunately, Zach wasn’t available until the next morning, but suggested we come by the Mash House for dinner that night. On the way over, we saw a number of billboards advertising scantilly clad entertainment, including a topless truck stop telling us “We dare to be bare.” At the Mash House, we took one step into the bar and smelled smoke. North Carolina is tobacco country, and will probably be the last place to ban smoking in bar areas. A waiter told us it would get worse in an hour, and suggested we eat in the smoke-free dining room. The cavernous restaurant had wall to wall carpeting and a slightly corporate feel. Our waiter arrived and wrote his name in crayon on our white paper table cloth - “Dave.” He scribbled “$nut$” beneath it, to remind us the nut brown was their $2 pint special. Iris asked for the beer sampler, and I got the IPA. Starving, we also put in our food order. The Mash House is known for its steaks, but we both went with the fish. My IPA was very good. Flowery in the nose, and clean in the finish. I helped Iris work through the sampler, and it was clear Zach’s heart was in his hoppy beers. I quickly ordered the Hopocracy, an Imperial IPA. Our drive through the less than tempting red light district had been worth the effort. The beers were delicious. My fried oysters were excellent as well, but the rest of the meal - Iris ‘s French onion soup was watery, and her pistachio encrusted salmon had burned under the broiler - was a disappointment. The place was packed, however, both the bar and dining room overflowing with high and tight haircuts. The next morning, Zach told us how brewing for the military keeps him on his toes. Many of the troops have been stationed in Europe, so they know their beer, and come to him with high standards. Not surprisingly, weiss beer is one of his top sellers, though many of the soldiers are hopheads. Zach’s a hophead too, and he immediately started complaining about the hop shortage in the U.S. He’ll soon have to discontinue his IPA, which won a silver at the Great American, and only bring it back as an occasional seasonal. He’s 132nd on the waiting list at Hop Union, where he buys his high alpha hops, and is unlikely to get much of an order over the coming year. “The guys at Hop Union said there’s enough hops to go around, but the big craft brewers, afraid of running out, have been cornering the market, making it tough for smaller guys like me,” he explained. He said the situation should improve in three years or so, when new hop farms come on line - it takes that long for freshly planted hop vines to produce high quality flowers. In the mean time, Zach will have to focus his attention on more malt-driven offerings, like the Belgian dubbel he was currently fermenting, and his highly sought after Jacked Up Stout, which he happened to put on draught that morning. Zach ages his stout in three Jack Daniel’s #1 barrels for 10 months, bringing it out just before Christmas. “It’s the same every year,” Zach said. “People start begging for it in June, even though they know it won’t be ready until the holidays. I wish I could make more of it, but I don’t have the room.” The Jacked Up Stout is so popular, he once found one of his regulars draped over one of the J.D. barrels, licking beer from a leaky bung. “He used to drink it with shots of J.D.,” Zach said. “He couldn’t get enough of the stuff. I made the mistake of telling him one of the casks was leaking, and that I had to wipe it down every couple of days. The next thing I knew, there he was, licking the wood. I was like, dude, what are you doing. He told me he couldn’t bear to have any of it go to waste.” The stout had hints of sour mash in it, but the vanilla flavor wasn’t overwhelming. Both Iris and I loved it, agreeing it was one of the better breakfast beers we’d had. It paired really well with our morning coffee. While we sipped from our glasses, Zach began washing out one of his fermenters. While videotaping him on his brewhouse platform, I had noticed my reflection in his copperplated kettles. Zach showed off his Popeye-like forearms. He got them from all the polishing. “I’m a clean freak,” Zach admitted. To him, paying attention to the details, like cleanliness, is what separates the good brewer from the mediocre one. “I can pretty much tell whether I’m going to like a guy’s beer or not just by looking at how he takes care of his equipment,” he said. Zach is also generous, putting together a care package for our trip, including a growler of the Jacked Up Stout, a mixed sixpack of some dubbel and tripel he’d been aging for a year, and another six of his soon -to-be rationed IPA. After saying our goodbyes, we left behind one of the cleanest breweries we’d ever seen, and headed back to our equally spotless campground. Whatever people might say about Fayetteville, there are at least two places doing their best to clean up it’s less than sparkling reputation. Both of them make the place worth a visit. I have a feeling that topless truck stop might be worth checking out too, though it’s probably low on neat freaks.
 SundayDecember 9th Judging by his out-of-the-way location, the small vynl banner sagging above his door, folded over so we could barely read it, and the way we had to turn sideways between two fermenters after entering through the front door, Paul Philippon, owner/brewer of Duckrabbit Brewing in Farmville, doesn’t want visitors. “I didn’t even have a sign until the authorities said I had to,” he said. “Unlike a lot of breweries, we don’t want people dropping by. It’s just my partner and I, and if we had visitors all the time, we wouldn’t get anything done.” Most craft breweries want to be found. Paul Philippon, however, is a contrarian by nature, a southern brewer who specializes in dark beers. “These days, if you’re going to survive, you have to have a niche, something that sets you apart,” he explained. “I looked around saw dark beers were underserved in our market. They said you couldn’t focus on them in the south, it was too hot. People want lighter beers. Well I’m sorry, but people have air-conditioning, and the people who drink craft beer, which are the only people I’m interested in, love the complexity of a full-flavored dark beer.” He started making an American brown ale (his only hoppy beer, and contrarian for the style, but excellent), a porter, a soft, creamy milk stout, and an amber. All his beers were full-bodied malt bombs, and bucking the trend, at least as far as hopheads are concerned. Right from the start, the milk stout was his best seller. His distributor said sales would die off in the summer, but the stout proved him wrong. It kept on moving, and eventually became Paul’s flagship beer. “When I worked at a brewpub in Cincinnati, I made a lot of different stouts, and the milk version was always the favorite.” When North Carolina popped the 6% cap on alcohol, Paul began producing four seasonals, all of them high gravity, including a Baltic porter, a barleywine, an Imperial Stout, and a Scotch ale. The Baltic porter, one of the best I’ve had (it’s up there with the Perkuno’s Hammer) is his current seasonal. Next up is the barleywine, which we tasted out of the fermenter. Last year’s barleywine was something of a hybrid, with both English and American elements. “I think it confused people,” he said. This year’s version is an all American classic laced with plenty of hops. Clocking in at just over 10%, there’s lots of malt too. A giant beer, but, thanks to some dry hopping, very drinkable even at such an early stage. I can only imagine how good it’ll be when it’s got some age on it. In line with his contrarian nature, Paul came to brewing after almost getting a doctorate in philosophy - he completed everything but his dissertation. “I looked around and saw a lot of people who were smarter than me having trouble getting jobs in the field,” he said. “There’s not much of a demand for philosophers.” There was for brewers. It was the mid 90’s, and people were opening up craft breweries all over the place. He’d been home-brewing since the late 80’s, and he decided to try it professionally. After a stint at the Siebel Institute, he immediately landed a job at the Brewmaster Brewpub in Cincinnati. Eventually he wound up in Farmville, at what was then the Williamsville Brewery. It was 2001, and Paul was working for a businessman who wasn’t passionate about his product. Craft beer was more competitive than ever, and Paul saw his boss making what he thought were some big mistakes, like trying to compete on price. As far as Paul was concerned, low prices implied a cheaper product. “I told him that if he ever wanted to sell the brewery, I’d be interested in making an offer,” Paul said. “It was about a year before he was ready to give up.” Paul bought the equipment and the space, and renamed his venture Duckrabbit Brewing. If you examine the logo, it looks like a duck from one angle, and a rabbit from another. The symbol, and the story, came from a book by Wittgenstein, probably the most important philosopher since Kant. “I wanted something that had some relevance to my former life,” Paul explained. “I also thought the logo looked cool.” As the owner and brewer, he vowed to follow his own instincts, even if they were the opposite of what accepted opinion said he should do. He had his own vision for Duckrabbit, and he refused to be swayed. “There’s a lot of temptation to stray,” he said. “Marketers telling me I could do even better if I added some lighter beers to my portfolio. I think it’s important to maintain your focus, and not listen to what others are saying. The really successful people in this business are the ones who are selling something unique, with their own distinct personality.” Maybe that’s the real reason Paul discourages visitors. He’s afraid they’ll try to tell him what to do. He has his vision, and he’s sticking to it, no matter how tough the road. He and his partner work seven days a week, to the point where Paul refers to himself as “the hermit.” The only time they aren’t in the brewery is during the fall, when they’re out promoting their beers at festivals. Paul is philosophical about all the hard work. “It isn’t work,” he said. “It’s what I love to do.” We love barbecue, and wanted to try some of the Carolina variety. “Are you kidding,” he said, laughing at our northern naivite. “It’s Sunday and you’re in the south. All the great barbecue joints are closed. The owners are all at church. I can recommend a great Thai place though. I was there last night.” A great Thai place? In Greenville, North Carolina? It was an unusual suggestion. When we found the place, however, and opened our menus, we discovered they specialized in duck dishes. Unfortunately, they didn’t serve Duckrabbit beer to go with them. But they did make some of the best Tom Yum soup we’ve ever had.
 FridayDecember 7th People are always asking Bob Green, owner of the Green Acres Campground in Williamston, North Carolina, the secret to his great tasting coffee. It isn’t the beans. He buys whatever’s on sale at Walmart. According to Bob, it’s the soft water from his well. The coffee was great, even black out of a styrofoam cup. Unfortunately, the water was so soft I couldn’t get the shampoo out of my hair. The other thing people ask Bob is why he’s got wifi, but no cell phone service. Bob said the only phones that did work were Suncom and Alltel, which I’d never heard of. Desperate to make a phone call, I got in my truck and drove ten miles with my cell phone up in the air, searching for a signal. Bob was right. I didn’t pick up anything. He said I could have gone 30 miles and it wouldn’t have mattered. We had hoped to meet up with Paul Philippon, of Duckrabbit Brewing, that day, but thanks to the weather we were behind schedule. Without phone service, we had no way of getting in touch with Paul to set up a new time. I sent emails to Alan and Tim, but didn’t hear back from either of them. I needed a go-between who could contact Paul and explain the situation. Someone who was hardwired into their Blackberry. I needed Joe Ward. Whenever I sent him an email, I usually heard back before I lost contact with the send button. It was Friday, with a Giants game approaching, which meant Joe would be online adjusting his fantasy football picks, while moaning about Tom Coughlin’s December record with all the other bluebloods. It took him 20 seconds to get back to me. A few minutes later, I got an email saying Paul was busy on Saturday but could do Sunday at 2pm. Problem solved. I could get back to figuring out how to attach the legs to my Weber traveling grill without the nuts, bolts, and washers, which were missing. The weather had finally warmed up, and I was ready to grill some crab cakes and tuna steaks I’d picked up at a seafood market on the road from the Outerbanks. The fire pit at our campsite, a rusty old wheel well, looked promising. I stuck the Weber inside and it fit perfectly. I called Iris out of the trailer so she could see how I had finally figured something out. That night, while the tuna steaks cooked on my legless grill, I stared out at the moonlight glimmering off Bob’s bass pond, while sipping a glass of Weeping Radish Christmas beer. This whole RVing thing definitely had its moments.
 ThursdayDecember 6th While sitting at the Weeping Radish bar - reclaimed from the facade of a 1920’s grocery store, with old bills and receipts lacquered into the counter top - we met Gus Fiducia, a friend of Tom Baker from Heavyweight. Gus had been coming to the Outer Banks for 20 years, first arriving when Weeping Radish started. According to Gus, it wasn’t the beautiful beaches and picturesque sand dunes that made him buy a house in Kill Devil Hills, at milepost 8.5, it was Uli’s beer. Which was lucky, because most of the dunes and incredible views of the Outer Banks have been covered over by second homes, chain stores, and brewthru’s (beer stores you actually drive inside). Gus’s house turned out to be in a better spot than he imagined, for in 2001, Eric Reece, Aubrey Davis, and Tina Mackenzie (now married to Eric) founded the Outer Banks Brewing Station across the street. Eric, Aubrey, and Tina met in the mountains of Chang Rai, Thailand working for the Peace Corps. Eric didn’t seem to remember much about his time in the Golden Triangle, though he was fairly certain about what came next: the three friends wound up in Berkley, California, where Eric worked as a brewer with Scott Meyer (who is now producing award winning beers for the Brewing Station). Tina trained as a pastry chef, and Aubrey started laying plans for a brewpub on the North Carolina coast, where he had spent his summers as a kid. When they finally built the Outbanks Brewing Station, it’s design was inspired by turn-of-the-century lifeguard stations. The bar is reminiscent of a lifeboat pointed towards the ocean, ready to be pushed down the tracks in the dining room floor, which are bricks salvaged from homes long since washed away. Tina collected them over the years, while Eric’s job was hauling them around whenever they moved. Tired of lugging his wife’s masonry, he cemented them into the Brewing Station, a symbol of what the Outerbanks used to be. Using reclaimed materials is also environmentally friendly, something else the trio wants to be, an attitude left over from their Peace Corps days. They just got permission to build a 10 kilowat wind turbine on the property next door, though the approval took about 5 years. The previous mayor wanted to put a crematorium on that spot (it turned out she had a vested interest in a large funeral home). When Eric and his friends exposed her conflict of interest, she didn’t appreciate it, and did everything she could to block their turbine. When she recently ran for re-election, Eric mobilized his friends and got her defeated. “Only about 10% of the people around here vote,” he said. “All we had to do was get 500 people to come out against her.” When they’re not influencing elections, they’re busy making some very good beer, particularly the Compass Rose “Secret Spiced” Ale, made with rosemary and Belgian yeast. Iris loved the bourbon-aged barleywine, clocking in at 10%. The food was good too - I tried the bratwurst over sauerkraut and mashed potatos, while Iris had the steamed shrimp with Cajun spices. It was 4pm, so the menu was limited. Iris ordered creme brulee, despite the fact that Tina was no longer the pastry chef. “She had to give it up when we started pumping out kids,” Eric said. The Brewing Station quiets down in the winter, and Eric keeps the 200 seat restaurant closed, surviving off the 30 seat bar and small lounge. The Outer Banks goes from a quarter of a million people in the summer down to a winter population of about 40,000. A lot of the restaurants close in December and January, so it’s tough to find a good meal this time of year. Gus had sent us over to Kelley’s the night before, for what he called dependable food,” and he was right - it was solid, but not memorable. In fact, I can’t remember what I had. Gus bought me my last beer on the Outerbanks - the OBS Stout, with plenty of chocolate malt, similar to a Beamish - and then told us stories about his years in the area. Gus was usually the main character, with beer as the plot. The hot tub episode was my favorite. He happened to be over at the Weeping Radish one year when the Christmas Beer was tapped. The bartenders weren’t supposed to serve anyone more than one, but Gus was a regular, so they let him have two, on top of a Black Radish. Back home, he opened another beer and climbed into his hot tub. Over the next hour, he watched the water go up one degree. The next time he checked, it had risen four degrees. Getting up, he noticed his body had shriveled up badly. Going inside, he checked the time. It was 2 am, and he’d been braising for about four hours. Somehow he hadn’t drowned. Iris suggested it might have been the beer bottle in his hand that kept him afloat. “Yeah, I’m lucky that way,” Gus said, toasting our trip. We headed out, hoping some of his luck would rub off on us.
WednesdayDecember 5 Heading towards the Weeping Radish Brewery, I thought about how the Hampton Lodge Campground was helping us appreciate cell phone service and wifi, neither of which existed inside our compound, though a 200 foot yacht was parked right outside the Coinjock Marina Restaurant, just down the road - if you eat there, avoid the wahoo steaks, which would have made a great pair of boat shoes. Weeping Raddish, founded by Uli Bennewitz back in 1986, also harkens back to a simpler time, when phone service was more likely to be two empty cans of sauerkraut connected by a wire. According to the billboard out front, Weeping Radish is a Farm Brewery and Butchery, though Uli’s being modest - or he didn’t want a sign bigger than his building, which he would have needed for all the acitivities going on under his large corrugated roof. Here’s the list: brewery; craft butchery; smokehouse; farmer’s market; deli; music hall; wedding pavilion; bar and cafe; candy store; organic farm; and an ice skating rink, which was under construction but nearly finished. The brewery opened a year ago (Uli built the original Weeping Raddish back in 1986 in Manteo, where it remained until the brewery fell through the wood floor, at which time Uli decided to build a new complex up the road in Jarvisburg, with a concrete floor). Everything else was a work in progress. When I asked Uli when the whole concept would be completed, he became defiant. “I will never finish it,” he said. “That’s the whole point.” Uli is from Barvaria, a land famous for its Weiss Beer, its sausage, and it’s incredibly stubborn people, though Bavarians prefer the word “traditional.” This may explain why Uli has decided to create a Bavarian oasis in the south. It also explains why Uli feels so strongly about what he’s doing, and why no one is going to stop him. Unfortunately, there are people who can slow him down, first and foremost the locals who live in the area. His neighbors, particularly those in government, don’t like the way Uli openly talks about the “stupidity of the bureaucratic mind,” which he’ll go on about if you get him started. The more he complains about government regulation, the more the powers that be do everything they can to make his life miserable. For example, his meat locker has a very expensive fire door because the fire inspector found out frozen meat could, in theory, spontaneously combust at minus 42 degrees. Upstairs, inspectors made him build a forty foot wheelchair ramp to his bathrooms, with light switches two feet off the ground, though he doesn’t have an elevator to get anyone in a wheel chair up to the second floor, and there are two handicapped bathrooms on the ground floor. The list of hoops Uli has jumped through is as long as the concepts he’s fighting to get approved. Of course it doesn’t help that the local citizenry doesn’t like German beer, no matter how great it is (according to Uli, his Black Radish is listed as the best example of an American schwartz beer by the judging committee of the Great American Beer Festival). Uli is the first to tell you people from North Carolina don’t drink his beer. Most of his customers are people of German descent visiting from the Ohio Valley. It’s hard to look at the money he’s invested without wondering why he didn’t go to a place where people appreciate unfiltered lagers made in the traditional, time-consuming manner, requiring a gigantic, and very expensive, cold room full of lagering tanks. Judging by his imported smoker, and the array of equipment in his butchery, all imported from Germany - almost everything on the grounds was shipped from the fatherland, including his malt - money isn’t the point either. Though Uli came to North Carolina to do some agricultural consulting work, and, as he says, he’s just a farmer, he’s being modest again, for he’s also one of the top land brokers in the area. Which is good for us, because his beers are superb. When the Manteo brewery disappeared into the mud down on Roanoke Island, he had is beer contract brewed up at Clipper City, and it wasn’t quite the same. Now his schwartz beer is better than ever, and his Christmas beer, a 9% doppelbock, was equally good if not better. By the way, if you’re wondering why he’s building an ice skating rink in a part of the country that only gets cold when Iris and I are visiting, it’s to promote a family atmosphere. According to him, “the people of the south have a strange relationship with alcohol,” seeing it as a source of iniquity and anti-religious. But as soon as people heard he was putting in an ice skating rink, the churches started calling, wondering when it would be finished. “Anything that gets the evangelicals off my back, is fine by me,” he said.
MondayDecember 3 My sister Jess called to warn us that high winds were expected in the mid-Atlantic states. I have to admit that when it came to potential plagues, I hadn’t thought of wind. I’ve always enjoyed a good stiff breeze, especially when I’m sailing. We weren’t on a sailboat, though. We were in a trailer, and 40 mph winds, with gusts up to 50, were the last thing you wanted in an RV. The day started off great. At the Tall Pines Campground in Lewes, it was sunny and in the upper 50’s. Having just endured the low 20’s, the air felt tropical. The moss coating many of the trailers around us made it feel like we were finally in the south. The warmth proved to be shortlived. A second cold front was blowing down from the north, bringing more frigid weather. We had to reach North Carolina by late afternoon if we wanted to avoid yet another deep freeze. Where was global warming when you needed it? We had already told Sam Calagione we couldn’t stop, and that we’d have to shoot the Milton brewery another time. Up above, geese were frantically massing by the thousands, queuing up for their trip south. They undoubtedly sensed the iminent change in weather. Before leaving, I took a quick walk around the campground, and stumbled upon my first log cabin trailer. What kind of truck did you need to pull something like that. I also found a trailer flying the Korean flag. Iris is Korean. Her family has a trailer in Amish country, in Shipshewana, Indiana. She had grown up RVing, which was probably why she knew how to stow everything so it stayed in the cupboards. I still hadn’t mastered this art form, which was why she threw me out whenever it came time to pack up and hit the trail. When we finally got on the road, I immediately noticed the aforementioned high winds, especially the stronger gusts, which pushed us towards the oncoming traffic. I watched the swirling leaves, and whenever they went up over the geese, I knew we were about to head sideways, and I spun the wheel left. Then, when the wind relented and we began heading for one of the empty cornfields on either side of us, I steered in the other direction. Why had the people of Delaware cut down all their trees to plant corn? Every time a gust of wind knocked us first one way and then the other, I understood why RV’rs dread high winds. We zigzagged down through Delaware, Maryland, and finally the eastern shore of Virginia, passing places I wanted to see: the wilderness of Assateague Island; the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, famous for its wild ponies. Not to mention the great beer we had just blown by, both at Dogfish Head and Stuart’s Brewing, over in Bear, Deleware, which Dave Wollner had told me about. I hated not being able to stop, but Iris and I had learned our lesson up north. We weren’t taking any more chances, at least not on purpose. We reached the Chesapeake Bay Bridge/Tunnel around noon, right on schedule. Eighteen miles long, the combination bridge and tunnel connects Virginia’s Eastern Shore with Virginia proper. Pulling up, I noticed the woman in the booth was shaking her head at me. “The bridge is closed to all oversized vehicles,” she said. “The winds are level one, with gusts over 50 mph. You’ll have wait over there until we open it up again.” She pointed at a rest area on the other side of the road, already full of RV’s, trucks, and tractor trailers. I asked her how long it would be. She shrugged, and said someone would come over and tell us when the all clear was given. I called Jess for an update, and got my brother-in-law Paul, who said the high winds were expected to last at least 24 hours, and it was supposed to drop into the 20’s. Another night of dripping faucets. He also told me about these neat little packets you flush down your toilet to control the smell from the blackwater tank. Paul is a boater from way back - boats and RV’s being close cousins - so he’s up on all the latest gadgets. We didn’t have enough water in our tank to run our faucets all night, not in a rest area without hook-ups. Iris had noticed an RV park back up the road, so called. They were open, with full hook-ups. At least we’d survive the cold. The Sunset Beach RV Resort park was bare bones, with no public bathrooms or showers and definitely no beach. It looked like an airport runway. Unless the bridge was closed, there didn’t seem to be any other reason for stopping there. Until I noticed the New Jersey motorhome with its skin peeling off next door. The guy who owned it had all his belongings spread out around him, maybe so he could remember where everything was. When I loaded all my gear in the back of my pick-up, I invariably had to pack and unpack all my cargo boxes whenever I wanted anything. My new neighbor had solved this problem. Unfortunately, I couldn’t bring myself to lay all my belongings out on the grass. Even if I had been able to do it, Iris would have locked me out of the trailer until I put it all away. She’s a bit of a privacy freak. Anyway, my neighbor was sitting at his picnic table, assembling a half dozen fishing rods despite the forty mph winds - powerful enough to nearly remove the door from our trailer - so maybe the fishing was good. We left him to it and disappeared into our badly swaying home, where we watched Monday Night Football. Iris loves the Patriots and they were playing just up the road in Baltimore. The commentators kept commenting on how cold and windy it was. They should have seen what it was like where we were. Iris woke me up every hour, asking if we were about to roll over. The wind was still blowing the next morning, and we were about to pay for another night at Sunset Beach, when a fellow RV’r told us the bridge was open. I was still nervous about the wind, which still felt pretty strong to me, but I really didn’t want to spend another night beside our neighbor’s yard sale. Driving over the first span, I watched the wind whip the tops off the water far below us. I stopped looking down real quick, focusing instead on where we wanted to go. The wind was manageable, and we finally crossed the Chesapeake. Two hours later, we were hooked up in Coinjock, North Carolina, at Hampton Lodge Campgrounds. The place was a little broken down, but our pull through site was fifty feet from the water and a gorgeous view across the bay. Ann Slade, who ran the place, said more cold was expected that night, but it wasn’t supposed to go much lower than freezing. Freezing we could handle. Iris and I both felt that thanks to our trials and tribulations, if we ever did get some good weather, we’d be much more appreciative. Our days of taking things for granted were over.
 SundayDecember 2 It wasn’t our clock making all the noise. It was a much louder alarm from outside the trailer. Had we run out of propane? Still fully dressed, I put on my boots and headed out the door. We had drained one tank of LP gas, but the system had automatically switched over to the back-up, so that wasn’t the problem. The alarm was coming from the campground’s registration office. Mary had obviously left for the weekend - they were on winter hours - and there wasn’t anyone around to turn it off. It was almost midnight, and I didn’t have to get up for another three hours, but it was even harder to sleep alarm bells ringing. I kept wondering if we were about to run out of propane. With no gauge, I had no idea how much was left. What if the back-up ran dry? We’d have to abandon ship, and the trailer would freeze for sure. Then I began worrying about the drive south. At highway speeds, the wind chill would be around zero. How would our pipes survive that? For the next three hours, I asked each rivet in my ceiling why we hadn’t headed south when we had the chance. At three I started breaking down our campsite, while Iris battened down the inside of the trailer. With the thermometer stuck at 22 degrees, we started south a little after four. We had the road to ourselves, and didn’t stop until the service station in Darien, CT, my old hometown. It was my first rest area with a trailer behind me, and, feeling special, I made the mistake of following the sign for trucks instead of cars. I wound up past the gas pumps, in the area where truckers park overnight. If we wanted to fill the tank, we’d have to back up about a quarter mile, which didn’t look promising. We decided to gas up at the next stop in New Jersey. We had half a tank, just enough to get us there. I headed for the men’s room inside. It was snowing when I came out. I couldn’t believe it. According to my watch, it was just after 6 a.m. The snow wasn’t due until early that evening. Iris was staring straight ahead, mesmerized by the flakes piling up on our hood. She pointed at the small crack in our windshield. It had happened a couple months before, up in Vermont. Now, thanks to the intense cold, the crack was halfway across the glass. Iris asked if we could drive with a two foot crack. I said yeah, it was saftey glass, though I couldn’t help imagining what it would be like cruising along in winter without a windshield. It would certainly make all our other problems look small and insigfinicant. Pulling onto the highway, we felt like we could keep going until the snow began to stick. It was so cold and windy outside, the snow was simply blowing around. A few exits later, however, we had half an inch on the ground and I couldn’t see much of anything. Crawling along, I realized we had to get off the highway and wait out the storm. We put down fresh tracks through Old Greenwich, the only vehicle on the road. Eventually we pulled into a municipal parking and hunkered down. “At least we’ve got a warm trailer while we wait this thing out,” I said. Climbing into the Airstream, I could see my breath. It felt colder than out in the parking lot. What now? I flipped the thermostat on and off, but nothing happened. I checked the propane. We had finished off our back-up tank. That meant no heat for us, and, more importantly, none for the pipes. We sat in the car wondering what to do. I called the Good Sam Emercency Road Service, but the woman said we hadn’t had an accident, and there wasn’t anything wrong with our tow vehicle or our trailer, so we didn’t qualify for help. According to the fine print in our contract, running out of propane was due to our stupidity, not theirs. She called the police to find out if any propane dealers were open at 6 am on a Sunday morning. The cops laughed, and suggested we join them over at Johnny Cakes, a donut shop about 100 yards in front of us. I could almost hear the pipes icing over behind me. What kind of noise they would make when they exploded all over our brand new appliances. Then I remembered my sister Jessica lived a half hour away, and she and her husband Paul liked to grill a lot. More importantly, they preferred the ease of gas grilling over charcoal. They might still have some propane left from the summer. I paused, not wanting to wake her up on a Sunday. Iris looked at me. “I think this qualifies as an emergency,” she said. Jess answered, and I told her the situation. An hour later, she arrived with a tank of propane exactly the same size as mine. Even better, it was almost full. Luckily for me, switching out the tanks on an Airstream was the only thing that was easy to do. A few minutes later, the furnace kicked back to life. We had heat! Jess and I drove around Greenwich until we found a gas station that sold propane. Now we had a full back-up tank. My sister had saved the day. All we had to do was wait out the storm. Jess went home to monitor the weather on her computer. We got conflicting reports from the various meterologists, but they all said freezing rain was headed for New Jersey. What they didn’t agree on was whether there would be a window when we could drive to saftey. Some reports said the sleet would stop between 2 and 4 in the afternoon. Others said it wouldn’t. The snow on the roads around us had already melted. Jess said I-95 had been fairly clear when she drove home. Iris and I looked at each other - it was 2pm, and we had been sitting in that parking lot for seven hours. We couldn’t take the anxiety of waiting any more. With our judgement long gone, we had no trouble deciding to make a run for the Delaware border. Despite 20 years of uninterrupted construction, the drive from the CT line through New York City, then up and over the George Washington Bridge and into New Jersey has to be one of the worst stretches of road on the east coast. Imagine doing it with a 5000 lb ball and chain behind you. It was like a rollercoaster ride - we went up and down and side to side. The only thing we didn’t do was a barrel role. As soon as we hit New Jersey, the rain started. Within moments, the windshield was completely covered in ice. I couldn’t see anything except the crack in my glass. I hit the defroster and kept my foot away from the brake. I just hoped no one got in front of us, because I didn’t plan on slowing down until it was warm enough for shorts. Every time we took a turn, we both leaned into it, hanging on for dear life. Even Cinnamon sensed something was terribly wrong, and started shifting all five of his pounds right along with us. Luckily the road was fairly empty. An hour later we were through the freezing rain and drowning in a deluge instead. The rain was so thick I could barely see the tail lights in front of us. Somehow we made it to Lewes and the Tall Pines Campground. We had called ahead, and the security guard was waiting for us. He guided us to our spot, right next to the bathrooms. In campgrounds, unlike restaurants, you want to be by the facilities. I tried backing the trailer into our spot, but I couldn’t do it. Maybe it was all the excitement, but Iris seemed to have forgotten her sense of right and left. The security guard tapped on my window. I rolled it down “You want a pull through site?” He asked. I explained how I’d only had the trailer for a few days, and I had to learn how to go backwards at some point, so did he have any advice? He said it was my lucky day. He had driven tractor trailers for 30 years, and all I had to do was watch my side view mirrors. When I saw the trailer filling one up, turn towards it. When it started filling the other one, spin the wheel in that direction. It worked, mainly because he was telling me exactly which way to turn. We had survived snow, ice, and heavy rain. What else could happen to us?
SaturdayDecember 1 It’s hard to sleep with the faucets dripping. When I did drift off, I woke up every time the furnace kicked on. Our heater, wedged under the desk, barely kept up with the cold outside. In the morning, the sun had trouble penetrating the ice covering our portholes. With no visiblity, the Airstream felt a lot smaller. On the Weather Channel, the forecast had changed for the worse: that night, temperatures in our area would bottom out at 22 degrees, and the snowstorm was now due by late afternoon Sunday. The idea of slaloming down I-95 with an trailer behind me was daunting. Still, having survived our first sub-freezing night, Iris and I decided to risk another. Instead of canceling the party, we would set our alarm for 3 am Sun morning, and beat the storm to Delaware, where it was supposed to rain. I can’t explain why we didn’t play it safe and head south right away. I think buying the Airstream had seriously damaged our sense of right and wrong. Or maybe our judgement had succumbed to the frigid cold. Then again, it might have been the fact that we hadn’t showered since Thursday. Unable to stand up in the Airstream bathroom, I headed for the public rest rooms. Something of a germ freak, Iris followed, feeling both curious and repulsed by the idea of group washing. The showers were warmer than our trailer, and nearly spotless, which was ironic, since we had filled our fresh water tank so we wouldn’t have to use the campground facilities. Anyway, we both felt better after we had cleaned up, though our hair froze on the way back to the trailer. While Iris prepared for the party, I called some of the breweries on our itinerary. We planned to spend two days at Dogfish in Milton, DE (we had visited Sam Calagione a month earlier, and shot the original Dogfish brewpub at Rehobeth Beach), and then head for North Carolina, to visit Weeping Radish on the Outerbanks, Duckrabbit in Farmville, the Mash House in Fayetteville, and Front Street in Wilmington. While talking with the brewers in North Carolina, I had a hard time explaining what we were up to, at least in a way that made sense. When it comes to inexplicable behaviour, craft brewers are tolerant. If it’s crazy, they’ve usually already done it, or at least fantasized about it. If they couldn’t understand our project, who would? On the plus side, Zach Hart, head brewer at the Mash House, said it was shorts and t-shirt weather in Fayetteville. All we had to do was get there. By the time our guests arrived, it was about ten degrees with the wind chill. Alan Jestice and Todd Silbert came in Jay Gregory’s old Buick. Warren Montero pulled up behind them, with Carl Uhlman and Irish Mike. A third car, containing the smart people - Joe and Donna Ward, Chris Ryan and Soyeon Kim (Iris’s sister) - would meet us in Willimantic. A bonfire, along with growlers of Willimantic’s double IPA and Holiday ale, helped take some of the chill off. Iris brought out some cheese, which immediately froze. The tours of our new home had to do be conducted two at a time, or everyone would have been looking at each other. Alan, who seemed headed for hypthermia - he’s from Alabama - refused to leave the trailer when his time was up. We toasted the trip, hovered as close to the fire as we could without standing on the logs, finished the growlers, looked around the trailer park, then at our empty plastic cups, and began inching towards our vehicles. So much for the party. Drowning the fire, we headed over to Willimantic, where Dave Wollner greeted us, then spent well over an hour explaining the history of Willimantic Brewing - it started as a deli down the road back in 1991, became a restaurant and beer bar at another location a few years later, and then moved to the post office, where the brewery was added, in 2000 - all of which I got on camera. Dave set us up at a long table and the food and beer started coming out. It was a great party, though by seven Iris and I were already thinking about our 3 am wake-up call. Saying goodbye, we thanked Dave for his hospitality, and headed out into the cold. Already in the low twenties, I was getting more and more nervous about our Airstream. Back at the campsite, our water line was clear, though a block of ice had formed beneath a small drip. If it got much colder, our water tank would end up looking the same way. I noticed piles of leaves around our site, and started stuffing them under the trailer, trying to insulate it. In my anxiety, I wound up burying the entire undercarriage. Stepping back, it looked like a weak attempt at camaflouge. Inside, I opened both faucets so they were pouring rather than dripping, then set the alarm and went bed. Somehow we slept until the alarm went off.
FridayNovember 30th I was still hitching up the trailer when Kevin pulled in at eight a.m. John arrived a few minutes later, hung over from a Jethro Tull concert. I asked him if the hitch looked right. Blinking, he tried to focus on it. “Looks good to me,” he said. We said goodbye again, and lumbered out of the parking lot, our GPS set for Havillands Service Station in Brattleboro. I had registered the trailer in Vermont, and had to get it inspected there, despite the fact that it was brand new. Stepping on the gas, I felt the trailer pushing and pulling us as we headed into the morning rush hour. The GPS ordered me to take the next left hand exit across three lanes of traffic. I put my blinker on but everyone ignored it. As the ramp inched closer, I said the hell with it and aimed left. Sure enough, they got out of my way. When they shook their fists at me, I stared ahead, smiling in contentment, like every other RV’er I’d ever seen. I finally understood what that grin was all about. Piloting a fifty foot slinky changes your driving experience. I could no longer drift off behind the wheel. I had to constantly think ahead. This became clear as we got off at the Brattleboro exit and headed into town. The GPS told me turn right down a steep road, and then announced our destination was on the left. I watched helplessly as Havillands slid past. A quick turn would have jacknifed us. I continued down the hill. At the bottom was one of my favorite places in the world - McNeill’s Brewery. I wanted to stop for a Duck’s Breath Bittter, but it was 10 am and they weren’t open. I also suspected drinking and towing were probably a no no. The GPS found a new route back to Havillands. Rounding a corner, it turned out to be one of the steepest, most winding roads we had ever seen. But it was too late. We had no choice. The drivers coming down the hill seemed genuinely frightened for us. I wasn’t smiling now. At the summit, we had to stop at a stop sign. It felt like the trailer was hanging off a cliff. When the coast was clear and I stepped on the gas, my tires started smoking, unable to move forward. My rear end drifted left into oncoming traffic. Finally my tires dug in and we staggered into Havillands. I looked at Iris. She was kelly green. The guy at the service station had me turn on my parking lights, my blinker, and... that was it, the inspection was over. We had driven two hours, and paid $20 so he could check our lights? I wanted more, and I got it. A little green sticker on the front of my trailer. Fully legit, we headed back to Connecticut. The weather was colder in Vermont, right around freezing. I wondered what the wind chill was. I had left the furnace on inside the trailer, hoping it would keep the pipes warmer. As we moved south, we listened to the weather report: a cold front was moving in. That night, the temperature was expected to hover around freezing. At least it was clear. The last thing we needed was snow. Pulling into the Strawberry Park Campground, I was physically and emotionally exhausted. This trip was supposed to recharge my batteries. So far I’d traveled less than three hundred miles, and I was shaking more ever before. What would I be like after 6000 miles? The campground had some trailers in it, but they’d all been abandonned for the winter. Mary, the manager, said everyone else had already headed south. After buying twenty-five feet of cable so we could hook up our TV, I asked how cold it was supposed to get. She said that night wouldn’t be too bad, but Saturday night it was supposed to really get cold. “Keep your faucets dripping,” she said, “or your pipes will freeze.” I nodded, then told her this was my first campground and I might need some help with my hook-ups. She said she’d send someone over from maintenance. We found our spot easily enough, but I had some trouble backing in straight, and eventually wound up straddling our site. By the time I figured out how to hook up the electric, water and cable my hands were frozen. That was when I found out the sewer line that came with my starter kit was three feet long. Thanks to my parking job, I needed a lot more than that, resulting in another long walk to Mary in the office. After I finished playing with all my new toys, which I already hated, I realized the water wasn’t working. Nor was the TV. That was when the maintenance guy showed up in a red BMW, wearing a camoflage jump suit. He asked if my water pump was on - he had a feeling it was based on my perpendicular parking job. He was right. When I shut it off, we had water. Iris, who’s much better at figuring things out than I am, had somehow got the TV working. I wished she hadn’t. Not only was a cold snap bearing down on us, but now a snowstorm was approaching from the southwest. “Maybe we should cancel the party and head south in the morning,” Iris said. The next day, ten of our friends were driving up from the city for a tour of the trailer and a bon voyage party over to the Willimantic Brewing Company. They had made reservations at a nearbye hotel, and I hated telling them not to come. I also felt like this trip was a momentous experience, and probably the dumbest idea I’d ever come up with, and I wanted witnesses for what we were about to do. “I think we’ll be okay if we keep the faucets dripping,” I said. “Let’s see how it goes tonight and make our final decision in the morning.”
 Thursday
November 29th
When we bought our 22 foot Airstream trailer from a dealer
up in Waterbury, CT, John, our service technician, spent two hours
showing us how everything worked. The first thing we realized was that
though our new home was smaller than our apartment in New York City,
the doors actually closed, and the floors weren’t nearly as warped.
Even better, the appliances weren’t from the 1940’s. I’m still getting
used to the idea that the refrigerator door has a handle on it. Yes, it
was only 176 square feet, but the panoramic windows made it seem a lot
closer to 200.
After our orientation, John asked if I had any questions.
All I could think of was, “Could you come with us?” I couldn’t remember
a thing he had just told me. It took ten steps to deploy the awning.
There was a great possibility that spider mites would start nesting in
our control panels. The trailer hitch was like a complex series of
marriage vows, complete with heavy metal bars, locks and chains. John
could see my anxiety.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll figure it all out.”
No I wouldn’t. He didn’t know me. I was still trying to
figure out how to turn the lights on at the new Tiger. When Oz came in,
he usually found me sitting in the dark, trying to read my newspaper,
unable to figure out it was brighter by the windows. I’m not a
figure-outer. I have a gift for making things more complicated, which
is why I had bought a trailer, hoping for a simpler life. But no. Once
again I was confronted by a lighting system I couldn’t understand.
Thank God I had bought a big, red Coleman lantern.
I did have one question. Since it was winter, and we’d be
camping in CT at least through the weekend, how much cold weather could
our new home handle. John, who thought we were storing the trailer
until spring like every other RV’r in the country said, “As long as you
don’t put any water in it, you’ll be fine.”
Living without water didn’t sound very vacation-like. It
sounded like we’d be living in a metal cave. So I asked him what would
happen if we did put water in the tanks. He hemmed and hawed, saying
we’d probably be all right, as long as the temperature didn’t go below
freezing for more than a few hours in a row. I made the mistake of
asking what happened then. He said our pipes would explode and we’d
have to come back and buy a new trailer and start all over again, which
didn’t sound good, except I’d get have have our orientation all over
again. John told us to go ahead and put water in it and head south as
fast as possible. Then he handed me a large canvas briefcase with a
blue Airsteam logo across the front. He said it was my manuals and
warranties, and if I had any trouble sleeping, I should just open it up
and start reading. The bag weighed about fifteen pounds. .
It was at that point that he wanted me to leave the service
bay, which was beginning to feel safe and womb-like. Iris and Cinnamon
were already in the passenger seat. I jumped in beside them, started up
the truck, and glanced in my sideview mirrors. It looked like I had
5000 lb vintage toaster behind me. Stepping on the accelerator, we
inched forward. Though the engine was roaring, it felt like we were
caught in some sort of tractor beam.
Iris, squeezing the life out of Cinnamon, said, “Something’s wrong!”
I had the parking brake on. Releasing it, we shot out into
the lot. The hitch made horrible groaning sounds as we bounced over the
bumps and potholes. Heading around the back of the dealership, I pulled
up along the other side of the service area and stopped. John came out
and helped me back into a parking spot. I turned off the engine, reset
the parking brake, sat back and exhaled. I didn’t want to worry Iris,
but I didn’t think I could handle much more than two hundred yards at a
time. Luckily, we’d decided to spend our first night in the dealer
parking lot, making sure everything worked.
While Iris unpacked our stuff in the trailer, I decided to
visit Kevin, the head of the parts department. He was wating for me,
with a big smile on his face.
“You’ve got the trailer,” he said. “Now comes the fun part - buying all the toys that go with it.”
Maybe it’s me, but I’ve never thought of filters,
regulators, water lines, and sewer hoses as toys. I did buy a box of
hanging lights shaped like miniature airstream trailers. Iris loves
anything tiny, and I told Kevin how I hoped it would make up for our
lack of water. He said he could put some water in our tank for us. I
explained about our cold weather camping that weekend, but he told me
not to worry. The next thing I knew, he was pumping water into our
trailer and I wasn’t stopping him. Iris and I stared in awe as we
watched pink stuff oozing out of our pipes.
“That’s the anti-freeze,” Kevin said. I watched all our
anti-freeze disappear down the drain. There was no turning back now.
We said goodbye to both Kevin and John, telling them we’d be gone by the time they came in the next morning.
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