With the scenery painted in brilliant orange and gold, generally mild weather and the calm before the holiday storm all working in its favor, Fall is the perfect time of year to sneak away for a road trip. But not just any road trip. We recommend one designed specifically around exploring and enjoying beer.
Long gone are the days when craft beer was sparsely dispersed about the country. With so many quality breweries dotting the map, finding your perfect ale trail has never been easier. So grab your uKeg, buckle up, and get on the road to beervana.
A good starting place for plotting your beer trip is Craft Beer’s guide to 5 Epic Beer Road Trips. This will cover you for some must-have routes, like Santa Rosa, CA to brewery-rich San Diego; Portland OR to Bend OR — a relatively short distance with a seemingly endless list of breweries and pubs; and multi-state (and rhyming!) adventures like Nashville to Asheville.
You can also take a look at Hop Culture’s summary of the best American beer cities for 2018. Then pick your point A and point B and plug them into this handy beer road trip creation tool (yes, that is a real thing, and we are very, very grateful to PintLabs for creating it.)
If you’re pinching your pennies (or saving them for another round of beer), you can make your cash go farther by planning your trip around the 7 most affordable beer cities. Albuquerque, NM and Madison, WI may be smaller cities, but their breweries per capita would make them worth a drive even if they didn’t go easy on your wallet.
Need to get your kicks? Head to Route 66. From Motor Row Brewing in Chicago, IL to Santa Monica Brew Works in California, you can notch an impressive number of breweries on your belt on this 8-state stretch of road that has captivated American road trippers for decades.
All of the above is just the tip of the iceberg. It would be impossible to capture all the conceivable routes in a single post. And with new breweries opening all the time, the list of beer road trips will forever be a work in progress. But, would you want it any other way?
