Sweet Potato Town

The planning for our 2025 Japan trip started way back in March of 2024 with a hotel reservation for eight nights in Tokyo. That hotel booking was quickly followed by a flight purchase to and from Tokyo's Haneda Airport just as soon as flights were available to bookend our hotel resy. Those two actions meant we'd be spending every night of this trip in one hotel in Tokyo. One hotel? For the whole trip? Yep, I know...it's rare for us. 

But one and only one hotel in Tokyo didn't necessarily mean we'd be spending every day in Tokyo. We wanted to explore a little beyond the city limits.

Our initial draft itinerary for this vacation had a few days with trips out of town. Mount Fuji. Nikko. And a walk in the woods somewhere north and west of the city to find some wasabi in the wild. But as we refined and refined the plan, gradually all those day trips fell away as we piled more and more Tokyo stuff onto our list. Eventually we were left with staying entirely in the city with just one-half day trip out to Yokohama, which we really considered to be part of Tokyo. I know it's not, but it sort of is in my mind.

Then at the last minute we decided our itinerary wasn't quite full enough and that we should stay true to our initial impulse and find somewhere a little bit further afield. For just one day. We picked Kawagoe, which we'd never heard of but which we found when paging through a borrowed Japan travel guide. The town (pronounced in Hopwood phonetics ka-WAH-go-eh) is about 90 minutes by subway and train from the hotel we had picked as our base of operations and seemed to have a few things that would hold our interest for a few hours.   

And so what's in Kawagoe? Well of course (and why would you expect anything different on this trip?) some temples and shrines (have to keep filling the goshuin-cho...) and some sakura. Let's face it, we weren't going anywhere on this vacation that wouldn't have a sakura or two or two dozen and we read that Kawagoe had a river towards the north end of town flanked by cherry blossoms on both sides. 

We also looked forward to a little shopping in an old part of the town that featured some historic warehouses (or kurazukuri) in a style of building that we likely wouldn't find too many other places in Japan. The kurazukuri date from a time in Japan's history when Kawagoe served as an important way station for goods all over the nation on their way to Tokyo. As commerce thrived, merchants from Kawagoe needed sturdy, fire-proof warehouses to store their valuable commodities so they built very expensive and very permanent buildings along the town's main street. These today are converted into various sorts of food and merch stores.

And in case you are wondering why I'm going shopping while on vacation, Japan is a Mecca of consumerism. They have the best stuff for sale there all over the place.

Kawagoe's Time Bell Tower. Keeping time and chiming since 1894.

And none of that was the biggest draw to Kawagoe for us. But let's not rush that. Let's spend a few paragraphs on the temples and shrines shall we? Or more accurately...one or two on one of each. Because we have to cover temples and shrines at least in a little detail. 

I wrote in an earlier post that we made an effort on this Japan vacation to curate our list of temples and shrines so we'd have something to remember each visit by. It's easier to remember a place with piles of daikon radishes all over the property than it is to remember a wooden temple or shrine hall with a wooden pagoda which you go see by walking under a wooden torii or two. And yes, pretty much all the temples and all the shrines in Japan are made out of wood.

If we had been hard-er core about temple and shrine visits on this vacation, we could easily have visited many more houses of worship in Kawagoe. But we figured two was enough when we found (1) a temple advertising 500 statues of buddhist monks and (2) a shrine that sold fortunes contained inside little red snappers that you have to fish for out of a bowl using a miniature fishing rod. That and a tunnel of ema, or prayer tablets, purchased and left at the shrine property so the prayers (I guess) have a higher probability of coming to pass. Assuming you believe that stuff.

The red snapper shrine (Hikawa Shrine) was worth a visit. We fished for (what is likely) a papier-mâché red snapper (it will now become a Christmas tree ornament, something it was NEVER intended to be), walked the tunnel of ema and made sure to check out Kawagoe's collection of sakura along the river (or was it more of a large stream?) just immediately to the north of the property.  We did not linger too long here. There's only so much fortune fishing you can do.

And no, we didn't feel the need to try to get one of each color of snapper (see below). Ours is the pinker color.

Hikawa shrine's basket of fish fortunes and tunnel of ema.

The temple was more memorable, although admittedly, we found nothing here to re-purpose as a Christmas tree ornament.

The temple we visited in Kawagoe is called Kita-in Temple. It was founded (it is believed) in the ninth century C.E. and like most good temples in Japan, it has burned down at least one or two times (I find references on line to fires that destroyed the place in 1202 and 1638). Remember the whole wood construction thing. Fire likes wood. Temples have burned a lot in Japan.

Sometime during the middle of the second millennium C.E., it became fashionable (and I'm probably overstating and dumbing down things here a little bit) for buddhist temples to acquire or commission a series of statues of Rakan, early disciples of the original Buddha who achieved full enlightenment and lived forever in a state of Nirvana. It started in the late 1600s in Tokyo and after that, other temples insisted on adding their own collection. Kita-in started working on theirs in the late 1700s and it likely took about 40 years to have them all carved.

They are pretty amazing. 

Find the sign on the temple property to the 500 Rakan; follow it loosely and imaginatively (it took us at least three attempts to find the statues); and you'll enter into a fenced enclosure holding row after row of robed figures in a variety of poses with a full range of facial expressions. Apparently no two are alike and I believe it. We didn't see any obvious duplication in our time checking out as many of the different figures and faces as we could. And I realize from the photograph above you can clearly see the temple's pagoda from the place where the statues site but I swear, it doesn't work the other way around. These things are concealed well.

While we didn't try too hard to check that there were no actual identical twins in the statuary, we  did spend some time finding a favorite or two and then leaving some yen in coin form next to some of our most beloved fellows. I picked a dude with a monkey on his lap (I know...always with the Year of the Monkey with me...) and the only figure I could find with a cup which of course I assumed held beer or wine or some other tasty beverage. He looked happy...what can I say? I'm thinking I could hang with that dude and try to get a little bit closer to enlightenment. Or something like that. I'd bring a cup too.

Oh...and apparently the sign is wrong. There are apparently 540 statues. We didn't count. Being in that space (and it was just the two of us), I felt remarkably connected spiritually to Japan and Buddhism. Sounds strange but it's true. There was a certain peacefulness to just moving between and around those figures. I'm sure the rain that kept everyone else away helped.

The Rakan with the monkey is in the bottom pic. See my earlier post for the dude with the cup.

But none of that was what made us visit Kawagoe. Don't get me wrong, that stuff all helped. But we picked Kawagoe because they are apparently renowned for their sweet potatoes. And Japanese sweet potatoes are certainly very special. Kawagoe is sweet potato town!

After we were done with visiting Kita-in and Hakawa and having seen the the town's famous wooden bell tower (yes, it burned down or was at least damaged by fire a few times) and the gorgeous kurazukuri warehouses, it was lunchtime. And there is all manner of sweet potato treats to be found in town if you look hard enough. Sweet potato fries. Sweet potato pudding. Sweet potato candy. Sweet potato noodles. Sweet potato with eel. Sweet potato ice cream. Sweet potato with chocolate. Yeah...we didn't have any of those things.

First bite? Sweet potato red bean paste buns. 

If you had told me 13 years ago before I started exploring places other than North America and Western Europe that I'd leap at the chance to eat some red bean paste and sweet potato enveloped by a soft and squishy and mostly tasteless rice dough called mochi, I would have said you were crazy. But that's what travel in general and Japan in particular has done to me. Red bean paste? Mochi? And sweet potato? And all freshly hot from the steamer? Yes, please.

So look...mochi red bean paste buns are a must have when you are in Japan. I don't mean a must have like durian in southeast Asia or Brennivin in Iceland kind of way. Not a rite of passage, I-can't-believe-you-just-consumed-that sort of thing. I mean these are genuinely sweet cravables. And add some thinly sliced sweet potato to add texture and extra sweetness. Good stuff! It disappeared quickly.

But what we really needed was a just plain roasted sweet potato. We found just that in one of the kurazukuri on the west side of the town's main street. Just sweet potato. No toppings. No gimmicks. No frills. No extra flavors. Just sweet potato. Roasted to perfection.

I don't know what it is about the sweet potatoes in Japan. I don't know if they just have better raw materials than we do here at home in the United States or what. But a simple roasted sweet potato eaten on the streets of some Japanese town or city is just mind-blowing. Ours were plucked out of the roaster, cut in half, dropped in a couple of pieces of custom-made cardboard and handed to us with a spoon in each half. The roast is so perfect that the flesh of the sweet potato separates from the skin with zero effort. And they are so rich and sugary that there is actual syrup to scoop out of the bottom of the skin. How on Earth do they do this?

What finishes off a good three mile or so walk complete with sweet potato lunch? Dessert, that's what. And I know what you are thinking...sweet potato ice cream? 

Naaaahhh. I already said we didn't have any of that. Dessert was sweet potato beer.

I will say that my past beer drinking experience in Japan has involved relatively straightforward, well-crafted and mild-tasting Japanese imitations of traditional German lager beer. And yes, the Japanese do it better somehow. So it was refreshing on this trip to have a glass or two of Japanese craft beer and there's no better place to get that in Kawagoe than at Coedo Brewery. They have a brewpub (or brew-restaurant is probably more accurate) near one of the two train stations in Kawagoe proper. 

This is not the first time I've had sweet potato beer (hello, Maui Brewing Company!) in my life. And to be clear here, this is probably beer that is brewed around or with sweet potatoes and not OF sweet potatoes. This one had body and thickness and taste and it was dark. What more could I want. Perfect end to the perfect (and only) day trip on our 2025 Japan trip. Kanpai!

Sweet potato beer (top). Kurazukuri (bottom).

There is one more and last thing I'll say about Kawagoe. 

Our walk from Kita-in to Hikawa took us down a ton of residential streets. Yes, you can get there by walking down the kurazukuri-lined street where we found our sweet potato treats but it's way out of the way. So we Google Maps-ed it and walked the shortest way we could down narrow streets and alleyways (some of the latter could have actually been some of the former). I swear I could have been walking through some small English town. I mean other than the obviously Japanese touches like the signs in kanji. 

It sounds crazy but I'll stick to my guns on this one. I think it was the tight streets; the tiny backed-in parked cars behind gates right on the street fronts; the overwhelming use of brick as a building material of choice; and the gardens. Especially the gardens. They all seemed to be super neatly kept and relied a ton on potted plants to add greenery, rather than flowers and other forms of greenery direct planted in the soil because, well, there's just not that much room for soil. Pots are more flexible.

How would I even make that connection? Well, I did live in England for 11 years and I still have family there and we have walked around the towns they live in a few times in the last dozen years or so. It's odd to say but the residential typology was remarkable similarly evocative. It was totally unexpected. 

I'm sure the rain helped. Rain always reminds me of England, especially when it's the type of rain that really makes you question if it's worth getting the umbrella out. We did.

So that's it. Kawagoe. Worth a train ride for a few hundred statues and some amazing, incredible, unctuous sweet potatoes. I don't know how they do it.

Last sakura picture on this blog from this trip. Kawagoe. Just north of Hikawa Shrine.

Have Another Beer

2020 was a year I was supposed to expand my wine drinking experience. We loved our 2018 Napa Valley trip so much that we decided to make a follow up visit just two short years later. I was excited. I had all the vineyards picked out and was ready to get out there to northern California and taste some amazing new (to me) wines. Combine that with some of the Valley's incredible food and it pretty much sounded like heaven. 

Fate, I guess, had other ideas. 

The outbreak of a global pandemic, working full time from home and all sorts of travel restrictions globally and domestically caused us to swap out that Napa trip for a week in the Utah desert. We just couldn't get our heads wrapped around getting on a plane headed all the way across this country of ours. My 2020 wine dream was dead. Some other time, maybe.

Sometimes, fate has a way of making things up to you. Instead of a few days exploring wine in California in June, I got a long weekend tracking down as much beer as I could handle in Vermont in August. Who'd have thought? Certainly not me. And I'm not complaining.

The last time I was on any sort of beer pilgrimage, it was in Portland, Oregon in 2018, right after I spent those few days in Napa I referenced a couple of paragraphs ago. We visited six of the approximately 60 breweries in that city in three days or so that got us some amazing beer drinking experiences. Now we'd have to do the same thing in Vermont, a state that has approximately the same number of breweries as Portland just spread out over an area about 66 times the size. During a pandemic. I like to think that I can embrace the challenges life lays out for me. I was up for this!

Vermont's beer history is perhaps not so significant to the history of American brewing as the city of Portland but that doesn't mean that this experience needed to be any less awesome than our time in Oregon two years ago. But because of the area we were dealing with here, I'd have to be a little more selective. Research would be required.

I started with the Vermont Brewers Association webpage, which contains links for about 60 breweries and brewpubs in the state. I then checked the website of every single brewery and read all about every one of their beers to get a sense of where I wanted to go to drink what I wanted to drink. That got me down to a list of 10 or 11 breweries that had the kinds of beer I would be interested in. A lot of them happened to be clustered around Burlington. 

Looks like we'd be staying in Burlington.

Fresh hops. Baird Farm, North Chittendon, VT.

My pre-trip research into Vermont's breweries identified some trends: lots of saisons (a simple, refreshing country-style beer); breweries that freely mixed the English, Belgian and German brewing traditions; plenty of fruit sours; the odd beer made with maple syrup; and a lot of different beers per brewery. This last point proved tricky because between the time I settled on what I wanted to go try while researching in July, the beers were frequently unavailable in mid-August. That meant heading to certain breweries with my heart set on specific beers only to find that what I wanted wasn't available any more. 

Now, ordinarily on a beer pilgrimage, I'd spend a good amount of time in bars or brewery tasting rooms sampling multiple different kinds of beer and talking with the folks working there about their product. This 2020 global pandemic forced me to alter that strategy and take beer to go. That meant plenty of cans, bottles and just a few growlers. Don't ever accuse me of not being adaptable.

I'll also point out that ordinary beer posts on this blog often feature photographs of gorgeous-looking glasses full of delicious beer in situ at whatever bar, pub or brewery we happened to be supping said beers. No such pics this time around. Instead, I've had to make do with images of (largely) empty taprooms supplemented with a couple of pictures of the actual brews taken in hotel rooms or right here at home. That means there are fewer pictures of beer than usual; there was no way around this, but I thought it was important to show some pictures of actual beer on this post. 

We ended up hitting six breweries in our (almost) four days in the Green Mountain State. Here's what I liked and what I didn't like, in no particular order.

Little Umbrellas beer, disposable cup, Best Western Bennington. Classy, right?

What I liked: Four Quarters Brewing

To kick things off, Four Quarters is officially my new favorite brewery.

Of all the Vermont beers that I tried on this trip, Four Quarters' beers were consistently the best. Now admittedly this is based on a super small sample size since I only tasted three of their beers but three out of three ain't bad. Or maybe it's like 2-3/4 out of three (we'll get to that soon). In addition to being consistently good across the board, the best two beers of this trip (in my opinion) were Little Umbrellas and Great Bear, and they were both brewed by Four Quarters. 

Great Bear is a brown ale whose label lists the terms "lightly smoked", "chocolate" and "oatmeal" which I assume is either the process of treating the ingredients used in the beer or the ingredients themselves. This is the smoothest, creamiest, most flavorful brown ale I think I have ever had in my life. Think about drinking a chocolate oatmeal cookie and you'll be pretty much spot on here. Amazingly sweet and delicious. I took notes on all the Vermont beers I tried. I wrote "Wow!" when I tasted Great Bear. This would be an awesome dessert beer. And yes, there is such a thing.

We picked up Great Bear at the brewery itself in Winooski, VT. We found Little Umbrellas at the Bennington Beverage Outlet, and already knowing the brewery was out of this particular beer, picked up the last four pack at that store. It's almost difficult for me to discuss Little Umbrellas, brewed with lactose, pineapple and toasted coconut, as a beer. It was more pineapple juice than beer on the initial taste but it was super refreshing, especially with a low 3.5% ABV level. This is likely the oddest beer I have ever loved. I've had beer with pineapple before but nothing so forward or complex as this. I'd have this anytime. It would be a great breakfast beer (yes, there is such a thing) or a nice starter to an afternoon of some sampling.

If I ever make it back to Burlington, I'm heading to Four Quarters for a few hours and sitting outside at one of their barrel tables and going through as much of their tap list as I can. Great can design too!

Empty bar pic number one: the bar at Rock Art Brewing.

What I Didn't Like: Gruit

One of the riskiest beers I bought on this trip was an ancient type of beer called gruit brewed by Rock Art Brewery in Morrisville, VT. Gruit was apparently brewed in the area of Europe where Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands come together today in a time when the use of hops as a flavoring for beer was not widespread. There's something about non-modern beer that fascinates me (see my banana beer post from Tanzania) so I figured it was worth splurging for a four pack of this stuff.

Rock Art's version of gruit is flavored with lavender, rose-hips, elderberry and chamomile and after one can the word that comes to mind most immediately after tasting this stuff is "medicinal". And that's not a good word to spring to mind when drinking beer. The yeast from the can floating around in the glass (it never settled for some reason) didn't make the drink any more appealing. I have three more cans of this beer at home. Anyone want to come over for some gruit?

What I Liked: Vermont Maple Wheat

Since I've just labeled one of Rock Art's beers as "medicinal", I thought I ought to make it up to them right away. Not that I'm looking to hand out praise that isn't deserved. This is.

One of my Vermont beer resolutions was to try at least one beer made with maple syrup. I absolutely had to do this, even though I expected that the taste of maple syrup mixed with beer would likely be an unpleasant experience. Not gruit unpleasant, but probably overly sweet and sickly unpleasant.

It wasn't. Not in Rock Art's Vermont Maple Wheat at least. This beer was actually one of the top probably four or five beers I had on this trip. Maple Wheat is a thick, dark colored beer which looks like cider (think cider mill cider, not fermented cider). It's a sweet, well carbonated beer that doesn't taste like maple syrup at all, although you can definitely get some burnt dark maple syrup which adds to the complexity. This wasn't the only beer brewed with maple syrup we picked up in Vermont, but it was the best.

This was a pleasant surprise. I have as many cans of this left as I do of Gruit. Maybe I can drown out the taste of the Gruit with the Maple Wheat? Assuming nobody's coming over to drink the gruit.

The outdoor patio at Four Quarters. Best Vermont saison based on our small sample size.

What I Liked (but not as much as I'd hoped): The Saisons

I love saison beer. It was initially brewed as a low-alcohol content, thirst quenching beer to be drunk after a day of hard work tending the fields in summer. Fortunately, this style of beer is available to those who haven't worked a day in the fields in their lives. In terms of August in Vermont, saisons (or grisettes, which are essentially a cousin of the saison) were available at five of the six breweries we visited. We picked up some at four of those five.

The saisons we bought up in Vermont were a mixed bag. Four Quarters' Fleur de Lis was light with a tart finish and almost exactly what I wanted in a saison, albeit I would ideally have liked a little more flavor. Good Measure's Tread Lightly (brewed with strawberries and rhubarb) was good but oddly not carbonated. I still have a second bottle of this in my cellar so there's a second chance to see if this beer is actually carbonated.

But overall I didn't get what i wanted of the saisons. I thought Queen City's Barrel-Aged Saison - Brett "C" fell flat and Rock Art's Black Currant Saison was barely recognizable as blackcurrant flavored in addition to being a little bitter on the back end, which I don't associate with a saison.

Well done again, Four Quarters. Not crazy about the rest.

What I Liked: The Green State Lager Can Design

We picked up just a single type of beer at Zero Gravity Brewing and that was a 12 pack of their Green State Lager. And yes, I bought it for the can design. Sort of. 

From a graphic design standpoint, the 1950s was probably the apex (for me) of graphic design in the United States, and any sort of product design that harkens back to that decade is an instant success. Beer cans are no exception. Green State Lager has full on 1950s going on in my book.

I love the gold and green (for Vermont) on the matte white can. I love the script "Green State" and the retro maple leaf. I love the clean-ness and verticality of the whole logo with the brewery name and mascot (the hummingbird) worked into the overall composition. This could absolutely be a product design I could see being on the refrigerator shelves some 70 or so years ago.

So I didn't deliberately limit myself to one beer at Zero Gravity and I didn't ONLY buy it for the can design. I would likely have bought more but Zero Gravity suffered from me wanting too many of their out of season beers (and too few of their in season beers). And I did want one American pilsner on this trip. Box checked!

I did, though, buy their Green State glass for the label. It was the only glass I bought on this trip. So they have that going for them.

Empty bar pic number two: Queen City. My order is on the bar.

What I Didn't Like: Taking Beer To Go

Honestly, this sucked!

When I go to a brewery or brewpub, I want to sit down in the drinking space created by the brewer and taste some beer. I don't want it to go in cans, bottles or even growlers. I want small tasters, I want full pints that I can sip and get more if I want or switch it up when I'm not enthralled by what I ordered the first time. I want to relax. I want to hold the beer glass in my hand and drink deeply and lovingly from it. I want to eat brewpub food or food truck food if that's what they do. I want to sit and enjoy. I want the place to improve my drinking experience.

Drinking in a hotel room or drinking at home after vacation...not the same. Not at all.

Now, truth be told, I could have drank in some brewery tap rooms maxed out at 25% capacity. But stopping and drinking beer outside at Zero Gravity or Four Quarters or Queen City or Rock Art seemed to be tempting fate virus-wise and sitting inside at Queen City was a complete no go. If I had stayed somewhere based on our quick stops at six breweries, it would have been at Queen City. I would have had glasses of Yorkshire Porter and Landlady ESB and more than the taster of Steinbier that I asked for when I picked up the six pack, two bottles and growler to go. Stupid pandemic!

By the way, the ESB was legit. I would have loved to have some Landlady from a cask. And the Steinbier (made with hot rocks in the parking lot apparently) deserved more than a taster.

Good Measure Brewing, Northfield, VT.

What I Liked: BLCK Vol. 15

It is rare that I find an English style mild outside of the United Kingdom. Travel to Northfield, VT and you'll find a good one at Good Measure Brewing right in their downtown space.

For me, a good English mild has to have a low level of carbonation (assuming it's not hand pumped out of a cask) and needs to have that tea-like taste that you find in good English pub beer. Good Measure has made sure the carbonation level is reasonably low and has guaranteed the tea taste is there by brewing the beer with actual tea. Now, sure, that sort of strategy is not totally traditional but the gamble totally works for me. 

And then Good Measure one-upped their inspiration. Milds don't typically carry a ton of flavor but this version totally did. Good dark roasted malt along with the tea improved on the original. Something different. Good beer. I'd put it right behind (and totally different from) the two from Four Quarters. 

What I Liked (although my research is incomplete): Burlington Beer Company's Fruits

So I'm not a huge fan of fruit beers. At the same time, I think there's a time and place where fruit beers belong. 

Our visit to Burlington Beer Company represented for me the biggest risk in terms of what we'd pick up to go. Part of this was their pretty much totally inscrutable beer names (how do I understand what Seances and Sacrifices is as a beer?) but another was the heavy reliance on fruit in the beers I selected.

I walked away from BBCo with four packs of Strawberry Whale Cake, Double Roadside Bandits (somehow a beer made with blueberry pancakes and some other stuff) and a key lime and kumquat You Can't Get There From Here (or YCGTFH, which sounds like some kind of H.P. Lovecraft monster). And yes, there are other flavors of Whale Cake and YCGTFH. And yes, I also made off with a four pack of Seances and Sacrifices, which turned out to be an imperial stout made with maple syrup and a 12% ABV level and $32 four pack price!

I was impressed by the Whale Cake and Double Roadside Bandits. You could taste legit fresh fruit flavor in both, although I'd probably give the nod to the Whale Cake because of the incredibly bitter yeast sediment in the Bandits. But the YCGTFH was like juice with a sour kick at the end. It was really pretty awesome and yes, let's face it, another breakfast beer.

If anyone living remotely near me is headed to Vermont any time soon, please get me the rest of the YCGTFH series of beers. Please! I'll pay handsomely. I need more of this stuff. Strictly for research, of course.

Empty bar pic number three: Zero Gravity. The people in this pic work there.

It is way more difficult to taste a lot of different beers from breweries during a pandemic. I mean it's just not possible to take one can of each beer to go. They sort of come in four packs or six packs. This was a real problem when we went to Utah and Colorado earlier in the summer. Buy a six pack of beer...you have to drink the whole thing before you move on to something else. It's not like you can bring it home with you on the plane. And God knows, I'm not leaving beer behind. Well...maybe the Gruit.

Fortunately for me, we drove to Vermont. That meant I didn't have to consume all the beers I bought up there in the Green Mountain state before we came home. We just loaded up the trunk with the excess beer and brought it on home. 56 cans and six bottles, if you are counting (I was).

Not only does this reduce the beer drinking stress level (yes, that's such a thing) but I also get to re-live one portion of our vacation every week for the next few weeks. Bonus!

We found some good stuff up in Vermont. I'm going to be sad when it's all gone. Going to have to stretch out some of this, although let's face it, there's no way I'm going to have any left by the end of October.

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How We Did It

We visited six breweries in Vermont in less than four days in state. Click on the brewery names in the information below to link to each brewery's website. I'm not posting hours for any of the six. This pandemic's probably got the hours all messed up and the best way to check current opening hours is by going to the source.

We visited Good Measure Brewing on our way from Bennington to Burlington. It's not exactly on the way but it's not a huge detour either. Was it worth tacking on 30 or 40 minutes on to our journey to bring home a four pack of BLCK Vol. 15? I think so. I'd do it again. We also picked up the Early Riser Cream Ale (get it!), the East Street Bitter (too much burnt caramel for me) and the Tread Lightly grisette referenced earlier in this post. The jury's still out on that one. If the second bottle I bought is carbonated, the rating on that beer has to go up.

Completing a pickup run to Four Quarters, Burlington Beer Company, Queen City and Zero Gravity took us less than an hour once our orders were placed in advance. There are probably other brewers that could be added or substituted in a similar time frame. I think all are worthwhile visiting. I'd go for the Yorkshire Porter, Landlady ESB and whatever else takes your fancy at Queen City; I'd stay all day at Four Quarters if the early returns are any indication; and I'd definitely want to spend time exploring at Zero Gravity and Burlington Beer Company.

If you are staying in Burlington or coming west from the eastern part of Vermont, it's a long ride to Rock Art Brewery in Morrisville. If I had to make that trip knowing what I know now, would I? Probably not, but that Vermont Maple Wheat is some seriously good beer. I'd definitely look for a four pack (or two) in a beer store if I'm ever in Vermont again.

Finally, I started looking at breweries in Vermont by visiting the Vermont Brewers Association website. I know it probably doesn't include every brewery in Vermont but it served me well as a starting point.

Finally finally, don't put too much stock in what I've written in this post. I believe I'm a knowledgable and serious beer drinker but I like what I like and that's not what everyone likes. Ultimately, we all need to drink beer that we like and not what someone else likes. If you make beer pilgrimage to Vermont, I hope you love what you find, even if it's not what I like. Clear enough? Good!

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Post-Original Blog Post Note (from 2021): I wrote this blog post about a month after our trip to Vermont. At that time, I had started going through the beers we brought back. Sometimes, beers endear themselves to you over time in ways that aren't apparent on the first tasting. Conversely, some beers become less appealing on repeated drinkings. After consuming my entire stash that I brought back, I most enjoyed Four Quarters' Little Umbrellas and Great Bear and Zero Gravity's Green State Lager. These beers were honestly legitimately awesome. On the flip side, I became less enthusiastic about Rock Art's and Burlington Beer Company's beers, particularly the Gruit (which I actually threw away) and the Double Roadside Bandits (which had so much yeast in it as to become unpleasant). I've left the original text of this post intact, but have elected to add this supplemental note. I crave Little Umbrellas and Green State regularly. Seriously amazing beer.

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One Potato, Two Potato

Not every trip I take gets a food related post. This year I've been lucky in the grub department. Our trips to New Zealand and Peru each got me writing a few hundred words about the local fare and if I got nothing else awesome out of our trip to Ireland at the end of the summer, I figured I'd be in for some delicious nosh. I mean after all, British food is my ancestral comfort food. I can eat this stuff anywhere and at any time. If the rest of the trip was a total and complete disaster (it wasn't), I knew I'd be well fed.

Let's stop right there. I know what you are thinking and it's likely something like 'ang on a second...British food? You went to Ireland, not Britain, right? Why on Earth would you think you'd get the same food on both sides of the Irish Sea?

Well, I did think that. I figured I'd be dining on pies and bangers and mash and sticky toffee pudding all washed down with cask beer and when I got peckish in the afternoon I could just nip into a Sainsbury's or Tesco and grab some Monster Munch or Hula Hoops. I just assumed Irish food would be the same as the food of Britain only maybe with more potatoes. I was wrong. Pretty much totally dead wrong!

Now, while I did enjoy some good bangers and mash and found at least one decidedly non-amazing-like-in-England sticky toffee pudding, I found out pretty quickly that Ireland is not a pie country. And by that I mean pastry on all sides of meat, veg and gravy pie. Walk in to any English pub and you are pretty much guaranteed to find a scrumptious pie on the menu. Not so much in Ireland and crossing the border into Northern Ireland (which is actually part of the United Kingdom) doesn't do you much good in this department either.

And cask beer? No, sir! Pretty much all keg over there. We asked the bartender in Dublin's Swan Bar about this and he told us if they ever get a cask it's either gone immediately or they throw most of it away. The better thing for them is just to stick to kegs. Yikes! There goes that assumption!

So here's some of what I downed while I was in Ireland and Northern Ireland a week that wasn't pies and cask beer. Admittedly there are some similarities to being in England. After all, it's difficult to deny no shared heritage there. And I should point out that I was not totally wrong. There were a lot more potatoes.

Boxty

Before every trip abroad that I take, I inevitably make a food checklist of local dishes I HAVE to have while I'm going wherever I'm going. Number one on my food list for Ireland was the boxty. As it turned out, it was the first (and best) meal we had all week. A landing at Dublin airport at about 10 in the morning, clear customs, grab a bus downtown and check in to the hotel and I don't know about you but I'm ready for a meal. Boxty time!!!!

What's a boxty, you might wonder? Well, it's kind of like a crepe, except made from (are you ready for this?) potatoes. I've had these things in local Irish-type pubs around Washington D.C. so I just had to seek at least one of these out during nine days in Ireland and Northern Ireland. 

News flash: boxtys are hard to find. They are not like crepes in Paris that are available pretty much everywhere. Fortunately for us, we found a place called Gallagher's Boxty House right in the Temple Bar area of Dublin. This had to be right.

Little did I know but the term boxty can be applied to a variety of dishes. Three, according to Gallagher's. All three of us opted for the familiar crepe (or pancake in Ireland) form, rather than dumpling or boiled form. Chicken with bacon and leek cream sauce for me (and shown above). It almost made me want to trade off any form of pies for this dish, and that's saying a lot for someone raised with English blood. If I'd known I wouldn't be served a better plate of food in Ireland I might have been both disappointed and completely satisfied at the same time. This is some good stuff.

Note: not all boxtys are created equal. We had one later in the week in Belfast. Not only was it not crepe-like, it just wasn't delicious like our experience at Gallagher's. I recommend Gallagher's. Highly.

Beer

Apparently they have beer in Ireland...imagine that!

Most people who travel to Dublin make it one way or another to a spot where they can have a pint of Guinness. We made it to a lot of such places. I had at least one pint of the black stuff every day I was in Ireland except for our departure day (when we caught a bus for the airport at 7:30 a.m.). I had Guinness in pubs, in restaurants, in the lobbies of both hotels we stayed in and at the Guinness Storehouse, the tourist attraction that serves as the clearinghouse for most tourists' most intimate Guinness experience. Guinness is so ingrained into the personality of the country of Ireland that I could almost have made a separate category for that drink on this post. I decided not to. Because Guinness was not the best beer I had in Ireland. 

I like Guinness. It's good stuff. I hope that was obvious from the fact that I had at least one pint for eight straight days. And it's not like it was the only stuff available.

But before I get to that, I have to say a few words about the Storehouse. The reason I used the word "experience" to describe this place is that's just what it is. It is not a brewery tour. It's a multi-story narrative about the product, history and business of the brewery set up by Arthur Guinness in 1759. If you've been through a brewery tour before (and I have been through many) and you don't like crowds (I don't), I'd probably recommend you skip it entirely. Other than the opportunity to sample some Guinness Foreign Extra Stout (gorgeously bitter chocolate flavor) and Citra IPA (super restrained use of the citra hops that American breweries use with too heavy a hand) I got nothing out of this. Plus it's expensive. It was cool to make a pilgrimage near to the brewery but it had little other value.

The best beer I had in Ireland came with my first meal in Ireland at Gallagher's Boxty House: a Jack Smyth Porter. It was to me a great balance between a classic porter with a perfect finish of hops in the English brewing tradition. Porter is my favorite beer and the English style of brewing (as opposed to German or Belgian) is my favorite tradition. This beer was set up to win. Beer in Ireland was good. But this one was the best. 

Cottage Pie

Let's get back to the potatoes shall we?

I'm sure most people who head to Ireland look for some shepherd's pie on the menus of pubs and restaurants. We certainly did and didn't find it that often mostly because (and I'm assuming here) what people think of as shepherd's pie is actually cottage pie (shepherd's pie is made with lamb; cottage pie with beef). We did find that. And it was really pretty darned awesome.

Cottage pie is a mixture of ground beef and diced vegetables in gravy baked in a dish with a topping of mashed potatoes, although the stuff we found in Dublin at The Hairy Lemon (apparently named after a local dog catcher) was topped with cheese over the mash and came with optional gravy. Want to know how to make cottage pie better than regular cottage pie? Top it with cheese, that's how.

This was likely the second best meal we had in Ireland although it's a close call with a couple of others. I have to point out the excess in the picture above. Cottage pie in Ireland doesn't just come with mashed potatoes on the top of the pie. It also comes with a side of chips. Love those spuds!

Fab Food Trails

Given our limited time in Dublin (just four nights but with two day trips in there), we thought it might be a good idea to take a food tour. The theory here is it would get us off the beaten path into some local spots away from tourists and give us a slice of Irish food different than pub fare. It worked!

We found a company through Lonely Planet that runs food tours on Saturday mornings in Dublin's city center: Fab Food Trails. Their website was pretty effective at selling their tours on us so we decided we'd spend about three hours with one of their guides (Tom, as it turned out) walking us around to some places we ordinarily would have just probably walked right by without a second thought.

We got a quick history of food in Ireland from Tom (it went like this: a nation of subsistence farmers saved by the potato which grows remarkably well in poor soil followed by famine leading to emigration for more than a century until the technology boom brought people back who wanted to spend money on good food spurring a culinary renaissance of sorts) and then we were off. The focus of our tour would be on slow food and seasonal ingredients. Sounded great to us.

I won't give a blow by blow of this tour. Part of the secret of a tour like this is the itinerary, and I won't spoil it. I'd say the highlights were the Coolea cheese, the Power's Three Swallow whiskey, the brown bread at the Pepperpot Cafe and the veal burger (don't knock it until you've heard the explanation) at Broughgammon. There is absolutely no way we would have found all these places (and more) in what effectively was two days in Dublin. Definitely worth the experience and the price of admission especially on the whiskey front. I have never ever bought booze at the duty free on a trip. I bought some Three Swallow at Dublin airport. It's like drinking caramel. 

Fish and Chips

Go to pretty much any non-fine dining restaurant in Ireland and you'll probably find fish and chips on the menu. Why not? I mean the place is completely surrounded by the sea. Between the three of us, we must have had fish and chips at four or five different places in a single week. 

Ideally fish and chips is cod (nothing else is right) in batter (not breading) dipped in bubbling oil. You want a thinnish batter so the fish can cook without the batter soaking up too much of the oil before getting to the fish. Oily batter is not good. No way! But you also want batter thick enough to be crispy and crunchy for texture before you get to the succulent juicy cod beneath. Add some salt, vinegar (none of that lemon stuff), chunky chips (not fries) and ideally and if you are oh so lucky...some mushy peas.

Where's the best place to get fish and chips? Well, a fish and chip shop of course. We did some homework and went to just one: McDonagh's in Galway, a place that's been open since 1902. We figured if it was able to stay open for the last 117 (!!) years, they had to be doing something good. 

All that I hoped for came true here. Fish. Chips. Peas. The batter was good and crispy and the fish was freshly prepared. A little vinegar and some salt on the fish and in the mushies and I was well taken care of here. Maybe top 10 fish and chips ever.

Black Pudding

Over the past few years during my travels, I've made a point to eat food that ordinarily I would not put on my dinner menu at home. Guinea pig in Ecuador, blood sausage in Cologne, springbok and crocodile in Zimbabwe. I mean if you are there, why not? I chickened out on the snails in Marrakech and I've never forgiven myself.

In Ireland, my choice was black pudding, a sausage made from pork blood, some fat and a cereal of some sort, typically oats. It's cooked when it's made into sausage form and then sliced and typically heated up somehow, usually by frying. Because our friend Bryan came along with us on this trip, I made him have some too. Bryan hates all kinds of pudding, but I'm not sure his hatred ever contemplated any pudding like this. :)

Now I kind of cheated here. I picked a place where I could get the pudding in sandwich form with some acid (pickles and tomato relish in the particular sandwich I chose) to cut what I assumed would be a stodgy, fatty meat-ish substance. Plus I sort of hoped the bread might hide any sort of objectionable texture we might encounter. 

I should point out that I've been at a number of tables with black pudding before since I am English. In most cases, they have been fried black with white speckled discs about one inch in diameter and cut maybe one eighth of an inch thick. I've balked every time.

We found the kind of sandwich I was looking for at Oxmantown in Dublin. The four inch or so diameter pudding was slightly warmed (I don't think it was fried) and presented between two slices of untoasted sourdough with the aforementioned relish and pickles along with some aioli (more fat) and rocket (or baby arugula for those of you who don't speak English). The pudding was soft, pretty tasteless and sort of loosely glue-y and chewy. The skin provided a little textural variance but not much. About what I expected and I'm not eager to try it again. I would have appreciated some toast on the bread. That would have added a little crunch which would have been welcome.

Back to normal food. Or if not normal, at least something with potatoes.

Potato Bread

One of the very last meals we had in Ireland was at Belfast's St. George's Market from a place called Sizzle & Roll. St. George's is an 1890s brick and cast iron (assuming there...) covered market in the heart of Belfast. It is the very last of several markets like this built in Victorian times. It's only open on Fridays and weekends so we had to wait until our last day to visit before heading off to Derry for a couple of hours.

Our intent in visiting was to grab some local breakfast from one of the many stalls at the place (it's not all food, to be clear) and see what else was going on. A quick tour round the place got us a look at a number of different types of breakfast dishes and sandwiches. We settled on Sizzle & Roll for just one reason: they sold sandwiches on potato bread. And by potato bread I don't mean the kind of potato bread we get here in the United States. I literally mean bread formed from some kind of mashed and formed potato.

Fried egg, tomato, cheese and more rocket between two patties of potato. I would have liked a riper tomato, a runnier yolk on the egg and there was some kind of sourness in each bite that might have been the potato bread. It was different but it was completely Irish in it's potato-ness. A good last breakfast in a great setting.

Tired of potatoes yet? You might think I was with seemingly every other dish I had included some taters but honestly, despite the focus on spuds, I did not feel like I overdosed on potatoes. I do, though, think I got an honest to goodness Irish potato experience. Interestingly enough, the last two trips I've taken (this one and our Peru trip in May) have been to two countries where potatoes are an integral part of their national food identity. Ireland blew Peru away in the potato category. They know what they are doing over there on the emerald isle.

I came to Ireland with a definite opinion about how my food experience would go. It was different than I thought but similar enough to the comfort food I love and grew up with to make me feel very comfortable. I didn't get cask beer much over in Ireland which surprised me. I also only managed to find one truly English style pie in my week plus there (it was in the same place I found the cask beer).

There was one other notion I was quickly and brutally disabused of and that was that if I needed a snack, neither Monster Munch nor Hula Hoops are readily available. This was almost catastrophic. It took until the very last day of our trip for me to find some pickled onion flavor Monster Munch and then it was only in a 12 pack which I refused to buy because I'd either end up eating them all or throwing 11 of them away (OK, maybe just 10). Hula Hoops were a little easier to find but then again they are made of potatoes rather than corn. We found some of the most excellent BBQ beef Hula Hoops on the way to the west coast. And no, the "most excellent" appellation isn't intended to differentiate those I ate in Ireland from those I've eaten in England. The BBQ beef ones are just freaking awesome all the time. As snack foods go, they are pretty much the apex snack. Unless pickled onion Monster Munch is in the room.

A few last thoughts about our food odyssey in Ireland.

First, we ate way more than I've discussed above but this is long enough already so I had to cut some things out. I did have some Irish stew along with some beef and Guinness stew. Neither dish stood out. We did have some excellent Indian food in Belfast at Nu Delhi. I could go back there about once a week.

Second, despite all the potatoes and other sorts of pub fare, I didn't gain a pound in Ireland. We are typically pretty active when we travel. I'm sure the slightly more than 50 miles we walked over the seven full days we were over there helped tremendously. I ate not much more than bread and cheese in Paris three years ago and had a similar experience. I was a little shocked on this one but I'm glad I stayed the same weight. 

Third (and almost final), most restaurants and cafes we ate at in Ireland had a number coding system for allergens in their dishes and it seemed to be pretty consistent from place to place. I'm not intending to make light of food allergies but I'd honestly never heard of a lupin allergy. Aren't these things flowers? The lupin allergy seemed to be number 14 on most menus we read (see cover pic of this post). We didn't see any dishes marked with a 14 as I remember.

Finally, while I was writing this post I discovered that both pickled onion Monster Munch and BBQ beef Hula Hoops are available on Amazon. I now have a six pack of each en route to me now. I will enjoy. 

Go to Ireland for the potatoes or the beer or whatever. You will eat well. I did!

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How We Did It

I think every food traveler has to seek out what speaks to him or her, even if it's pickled onion Monster Munch and BBQ beef Hula Hoops. But if you want to have any of what I found truly remarkable on this trip, here are some thoughts.

First and foremost, I'd highly recommend a food tour with Fab Food Trails. They will for sure get you to some spots you wouldn't find on your own and you may learn a little or a lot about the history of Irish food along the way. There are some really special spots along the two plus hour walk. They operate tours on most all Fridays and Saturdays starting at 10 a.m. as of this writing in addition to some other days of the week. Check their website by clicking their name in this paragraph for complete availability. If you get Tom as your guide, say hi from me.

Gallagher's Boxty House is located at 20-21 Temple Bar in Dublin. You might want to consider a reservation here when you visit. We didn't have one when we walked in and my impression is that it was almost a mistake. We waited maybe 10 minutes maximum and got a seat at the bar but I'm not sure a table was available to us any time soon. Again, this was the best meal I had in Ireland or Northern Ireland. I'd definitely recommend you stop here. And get the Jack Smyth Porter, which is apparently brewed specifically for Gallagher's.

The Hairy Lemon was probably our best pub experience in Dublin. It's located down near St. Stephen's Green a bit off the beaten tourist path (which is good I think) but the food and drink was worth it. We also heard our best trad music of the entire trip (which we found incredibly difficult to find as it turned out) here on a Monday night. I'd definitely consider a return trip here if I were ever in Dublin again. 

McDonagh's is an institution in Galway. I don't know what more proof you need other than 117 years in business. Get the mushy peas. Please. They are like the cheapest thing on the menu. Even cheaper than water, cole slaw and curry sauce. McDonagh's fish and chip bar is open seven days a week (the restaurant is closed on Sundays) on the very pedestrian friendly Quay Street. If you are searching for some trad music, this street seems like the place to hear it.

I'd recommend a trip Oxmantown in Dublin. I know my review of the black pudding was a little lukewarm but honestly I think that had to do with more than the black pudding. The list of sandwiches they had on their wall sounded awesome. I'd certainly be up for giving it another shot. Oxmantown is located at 16 Mary's Abbey in Dublin.

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