The time around summer solstice might be the best time to visit the Emerald Isle. “Why?”, you ask?
Well, in June, it doesn’t get dark in Ireland until well past 10pm, meaning there are more daylight hours to drink beer. And believe me, daylight makes a huge difference in your beer drinking stamina. Check out the picture. Taken without a flash, the time was approximately 10pm.
This Year in Beer trip is the follow up to our Dublin episode. In that episode of One Pint at a Time, we showed you some of our favorite places in the Irish capitol. For the YiB, we will show some of our favorites in the rest of Ireland… well, as much of ‘the rest’ that we can accomplish 8 days.
And we have a special theme for the trip… “Nitro-Free Ireland”. Chris got the idea for this from a discussion on the Irish Craft Brewer website. There is a practice in parts of Ireland of drinking room temperature pint bottles of Guinness. Yes… room temperature – not cellar temperature – the bottles of Guinness sit on the shelf behind the bar. People believe this is the true original way to drink Guinness. To make the trip more interesting, we will attempt to forgo all nitro-poured beers, which will be easier for Chris than me because I love anything on nitro. We will donate $5 for every nitro pint we drink to the Angel Project in Carmel Valley. They put together a “store” with everything from food items to clothes to toys to help needy Carmel Valley families out at Christmas.
On the trip, we will hopefully visit the following breweries:
- Galway Hooker in Roscommon (new for us)
- Biddy Early in Inagh
- Franciscan Well in Cork
- Beamish in Cork (new for us)
- Carlow Brewing in Carlow
- Macreddin Brewery in Macreddin Village
- Porterhouse in Dublin
- Messrs Maguire in Dublin (Chris is going to wear shorts, so we hope that they let him in. More on that story another time.)
While only two of the breweries are new, we haven’t been to Franciscan Well and Carlow Brewing in almost 10 years. It will be interesting to see how these ‘old time’ Irish craft brewers have changed over the years.
On top of the breweries, we will also show you some of our favorite pubs across the country.
Gus O’Connor’s in Doolin is famous for Irish music and is probably our favorite pub in all of Ireland.
The pub to the right – which not even Chris can remember the name – is in West Cork and might have the best view of any pub in the country. Plus, you get to carry your pints across a busy road to the outside seating area.
Other highlights will include:
- Visiting the town of Dripsey, which boasts the world’s shortest St. Patrick’s Day parade. The parade goes between the only two pubs in the village and measures a lengthy 26 yards. If we can manage the whole distance, we will have a pint in both pubs.
- Visiting a dolmen with the largest capstone in Ireland, weighing in at 100 tons.
- Us doing goofy tourist stuff… well, Chris doing goofy touristy stuff.
We will be spending one day in Dublin before we come home. And like the creatures of habit we are, we will be going to the same places we showed you in December. OK… maybe Chris will find one new pub to try and maybe we’ll show you our favorite music pub… maybe. Also, Boyzone is playing. We never miss an opportunity to see Boyzone.
After we finished up the Year in Beer Franconia portion of our trip, we met our friends Ute and Wolfgang of 
“Franconia” is the latest Year in Beer episode of One Pint at a Time.
We arrived in Cologne around 3pm, [By the way, avoid driving on A3 between Würzburg and Frankfurt until sometime in 2010] quickly dropped our bags off at our hotel, and walked the 30 meters to Früh am Dam. Früh is one of the more well-known Kölsch breweries and after a long day of travel, 10 or 12 small glasses of beer are just what were needed. Our group of six managed to down 40 glasses with Wolfie and myself accounting for the lions share. Check out the hash marks on the coaster.
A little Munich travel tip: the airport has it’s own brewpub, Airbrau, in the central area, complete with a biergarten. We chose this as an opportunity to grab a quick beer before we boarded the S-Bahn into the city. We were also joined by a friend of Ute and Wolfie’s, Tina.
First stop was the Weisses Brauhaus, the Schneider Weiss beer hall right off the Marien Platz. Besides the great Weiss beer, the main reason we wanted to go there was so that Wolfgang could do battle with the waitresses who can, at times, be a little snarky. But after years of waiting for this moment, our waitress was very nice and we had a pleasant time sitting in the sun and enjoying beer. Actually, the waitresses are more or less nice all the time – just at night and when it is really busy, they can be a tad short which is hard due to the language difference.
But soon it was time to get serious, and in Munich that means ein maß – beer by the liter. So, we headed around the corner to Hofbrauhaus and started the party for real.
The first order of business on Monday was to head back to Bamberg. The problem was that Monday was a holiday – and a religious holiday at that. Unlike the States where everything is open, a holiday in Germany means everything is closed (except for restaurants we later discovered). By the way, I think the holiday is Pfingstmontag.
We really weren’t sure what “Bamberg Beer Days” was about, but we figured that there would be beer and maybe that was where all the people were. What we remember about Bamberg from last June was that it was wall to wall people. But when we started walking from the parking garage to Maximillian Platz, where the beer days was being held, it was like walking through a ghost town. Still no people.
Undaunted, we decided to do the only thing one should do on a religious holiday – visit a monastery. Of course, this one had a brewery, Altes Klosterbrauerei. Why else would we be there? Funny thing is that I’m not even sure of the name of the monastery.
But a number of people, like us, found the pleasant beer garden above the cathedral. The brewery only had two beers, a Pils and a Dunkel, but you really didn’t need much more choice than that.