Will Bike For Beer

At top, a flight of beers from Blue Mountain Brewery at a restaurant in Williamsburg. Below, the beer aisle at Total Wine, and there were additional stacks of beer throughout the store.

Enjoying beers, earning badges in the shadow 

of national monuments and museums

The beer aisle at Total Wine. The beer list at Bungalow Alehouse. The primo lunch at We, The Pizza.

Those are some of the highlights of a recent trip to Washington, D.C., and Williamsburg, Va., a week-long excursion my wife Shelly and I set up to celebrate our 30^th wedding anniversary. We toured several of the Smithsonian museums, marveled at the collections in the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue and walked the first settlement at Jamestown and the battle lines at Yorktown.

Through it all, I also sought out also high-quality beers, particularly ones that are not available in Savannah. On our first evening in suburban D.C., we dined at the Bungalow Alehouse in Woodbridge. I started with a Big Daddy IPA, and followed that up with a Bear Republic Racer 5 IPA. As I was enjoying them, I was also texting with good friend Tim Rutherford (do your palate a favor and follow him at www.savannahfoodie.com), and he advised me to shoot for as many Untapped badges as possible during the trip. In all, I accumulated three: “Pale as the Moon, Level 5” “I Believe in IPA, Level 10” and, my favorite, “Drinking Your Paycheck.”

Later in the week, at Total Wine in Springfield, Va., I spend just as much time shopping as my wife did in the Talbot’s Outlet next door. I bought far too many bottles to list here: The receipt is close to 18-inches long. Included in that number are two that merited places on the Craft Beer Bucket List recently put together by www.seriouseats.com - Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald Porter and Firestone Walker Union Jack IPA. I also purchased bottles of Duclaw Sweet Baby Jesus, a chocolate peanut butter porter, and Adriaen Brouwer Dark Gold Ale, a beer that I enjoyed several times during my 2012 excursion to Belgium.

Look for more on those selections, and an afternoon at Alewerks Craft Brewery in Williamsburg, Va., in my next post.