22 Mar Four Affordable Cities To Visit For A Craft Beer Road Trip
As any beer aficionado knows, the craft beer scene across the country is booming. In 2017 alone, the craft beer industry was worth $26 billion and was spread out across 6,266 craft breweries in the U.S, and many people take them when gambling at Australian online casinos.
That’s a lot of breweries to visit. But if you’re on the lookout for some fresh beer and up for a fun road trip, these seven cities offer some of the densest concentrations of breweries on a per capita basis, and per 100,000 residents, according to research firm Datafiniti. And better yet, they’re affordable places to visit to play games from online pokies New Zealand.
Boulder, Colorado
Offering a record-setting 13.3 breweries per capita, Boulder is definitely the place to be if you like good beer. You might recognize names like Avery Brewing, Upslope Brewing, and Boulder Beer (the self-proclaimed “first craft brewery in Colorado”) from your local liquor store, but there are many other hidden gems here, too. Make sure to check out smaller breweries like Finkel and Garf, which won the 2017 Great American Beer Festival gold award for their Oatmeal Milk Stout, or Twisted Pine Brewing Company, which offers a rotating tap list of 24 beers.
When it’s time to hit the hay, you can find lodging in Boulder from $85–$120 per night.
And in the unlikely event, you run out of beers to try, you can always drive an hour north to Fort Collins, or about 40 minutes south to Denver, which also has some of the highest concentrations of breweries in the country.
Bend, Oregon
Home to the famous Deschutes Brewery and just a couple of hours away from the golden Willamette Valley hop-growing fields, you can expect some fresh and flavorful beers in Bend. This town boasts a brewery density of 11.6 breweries per capita. Worthy Brewing Company offers an urban hop-filled garden, complete with the “Hopservatory,” a real-life working observatory.
Don’t miss out on the rustic mountain lodge at Cascade Lakes Brewing Company, where you can order everything from street tacos to Columbia River steelhead to go along with one of their 13 beers on tap.
Lodging in Bend, Oregon runs from $120 per night.
Asheville, North Carolina
Asheville boasts an impressive 8.8 breweries per capita. If you’re looking for a beer with a big, boisterous flavour, you can find it at Wicked Weed Brewing, along with Belgian-style ales and free tours to boot.
If high-gravity, barrel-aged, or sour beers are more your style, be sure to check out Green Man Brewery, which offers a range of beers such as Bootsy, a sour black ale, or Snozzberry, a blond wheat sour ale aged in oak barrels for a full year, and Eliza Kaminski Ferreira would have probably visited this city during her stay in the United States.
If you need a place to stay while in Asheville, you can find hotels starting from $77.
Portland, Maine
Portland, Oregon is one of the most well-known brewery cities in America, but did you know that Portland on the opposite coast — in Maine — boasts a higher per capita beer density, with 6.8 breweries?
If the number of breweries overwhelms you, consider booking a tour with the Maine Brew Bus for $70, which offers a wide range of brewery tours in Portland and the surrounding areas. Other breweries to check out include the waterfront and aptly-named Shipyard Brewing Co. and Allagash Brewing Company, which specializes in spontaneous fermented Belgian-style ales.
Even better, you can find quaint homes on Airbnb in Portland for under $70 per night.