On Thursday I was supposed to go to the store and buy something for someone, vague right ;-) Anyway Thursday came and I was tired after work and thought to myself, "Self, what is the chance that someone will come buy this random item tonight. I'll go in the morning and buy it." Well the next day I go to the store and guess what happened. That very morning they had sold the item to a guy who buys all the discontinued/clearance material. I had missed it by about two hours. My luck, right!
So I began looking around because I committed to getting this and needed to find it. And I did - in Lenoir, NC.
Well I hadn't been on a road trip in awhile and it really doesn't take much to get me to go on one so Meg and I accepted the quest. We spoke to the store in Lenoir and told them we would be there Saturday since it was a bit of a drive. And then Saturday we got up at 6am and headed east.
The drive is an easy one basically get on I 40 and drive east for a very long time. It is a path we were very familiar with having spent a month driving behind TN and NC over a year and a half ago.
2019 had been a fantastic year for road trips. In December I bought a US map and went over my past road trips from that year to trace out where we had gone. Every year I will update it using a different color marker until I need a new map. And now I get to trace out the first road trip of 2020 in a month when cold and snow usually keep me from planning road trips. There are some other really great trips planned this year so much so that this map pictured below doesn't include all the states I plan on driving to.
Our drive to Lenoir was good. We had our puppy, Gypsy Rover, with us for her first car trip and she did great. She loves the car and does this awesome climb up into the truck where she gets her front paws on it and then flings herself back and up into the seat. Anyway she spent most of the trip sleeping. I did use a slow feeder bowl to entertain her and feed her at one point while we drove.
Saturday had some pretty rough weather traveling west to east across the country with the worst of it staying south of us. However we did spend the drive east staying just ahead of the rain. To the point where whenever we stopped to walk the puppy we would get back in the car to some light drizzle and within minutes it we would be away from it until the next stop.
Now I didn't want to go all that way and not see anything so I looked up breweries to see if there were any near by or along our way. I did know that even if I didn't find anything new I could always swing by Asheville which is a great town filled with lots of unique breweries.
I found a brewery with great reviews called Liquid Roots Brewing Project. All the reviews point out that the owners are there and very welcoming which is one of the great thing about the growing number of small craft breweries. It is nice to see owners who are also brewers and love to talk about styles and beers as much as the customers. Anyway, given the reason for the road trip boiling down to me saying I was going to do something on one day and then being too lazy to do it I wasn't going to make a blog post. Depending on how you look at it I went on this road trip on Saturday as a great move of friendship or to cover my own ass :-) But when we got to Liquid Roots I decided I would do a post because this part of the story was too good to pass up.
Since Liquid Roots does not get at least 30% of its profits from the sale of food and non-alcoholic beverages according to town/state code they have to register as a club with membership dues. So I paid 1$ and I am now a lifetime member of the club and can drive all the way back to Lenoir anytime I would like for a drink. I then ordered a taster of each of their own brews, they had a good amount of guest taps as well as their own.
I loved their wooden flight boards and each one was unique.
As we sat to enjoy the beers Gypsy Rover settled in again with her slow feeder to have a little dinner.
So looking over the description list there were several beers that really intrigued us. Again the cool thing about owners who are brewers is sometimes a willingness to take a chance. I would say the Ogre was the beer that had our interest the most. It was a "nerd saison". In the fermentor they had added 12 lbs of grape and strawberry nerds to a saison base. At first I was thinking it would be too sweet and I would not like it. But as soon as I tried it I was sold. The taste really worked well and the sweetness was not overpowering like I thought it would be. That being said our favorite and clear growler contender was the freedom ale. But there were so many good aspects of the beers that each one had us smiling, whether from its unique taste or the name of the beer- I'm looking at you "Water sucks".
Meg really loved the design with the sprawling tree root system. And the back of the growler said "Life's short. Beer happy." Which is a great way to sum up the welcoming atmosphere of the club.
The also sell a pretty tasty coffee and we each got a cup to take on the road. The way home hit some more of the rocky weather that including rain and some strong winds but my Ford Explorer Sport Trac handled it like a boss!
Road trip success, brewery success, and still keeping my word success.
