I'm not talking about a trail of empty beer cans at Bonnaroo Music Festival leading to a tent full of nitrous gas and neo-hippie kids. Nor am I referring to a trail of beer poured strategically in the forest to attract alcoholic bears that you want to kill with a bowie knife and turn into a rug for your fireplace. Nope.
A Beer Trail is where you get your Beer Passport stamped as you arrive, wayward traveler to destination microbrewery.
Don't worry. I hadn't heard of such a thing either and ... I drink a lot of beer!
But last week when I journeyed north of Maine's Vacationland to the city of Saint John, New Brunswick a sagely and wizened bartender at Big Tide Brewing Company enlightened me as to what this Beer Trail, Beer Passport, microbrewery quest was all about.
If you click here BEER TRAIL MAINE and glance through the Brewer's Guide, a road map to the best beer in Maine, all locally produced and not a drop of that Bud Light piss water - you might be thinking, "that's goddamn genius" and it is! ... but what's this have to do with Canada?
Good question! Let's continue on this Beer Trail a bit farther North, past the eclectic scenes of Portland, Maine and the Cadillac-Mountain-granite-scaped Bar Harbor, cross the border past the Mounties and into Saint John where you will find that the art of making beer is taken quite seriously!
"So why not a Beer Trail in New Brunswick," asks the bar tender/owner, Chris, of Big Tide Brewing Company?
I have no answer as I ponder the romantic notion rather headily from the FogBound Hemp Pale Ale. A journey along a path that continuously leads to good beer and great food all of which was made right there ... all around you? This is how life should be. I ordered another and listened to the story of Big Tide Brewing Company.
Open now for more than two years, nestled in downtown Saint John - nautically theme and rightly so. The world's most extreme tides move swiftly in the harbor and ultimately throughout the Bay of Fundy. The tidal range is 55 feet at times. These Canadians lay claim to the highest tides on Earth.
As you climb Princess Street, with its steep, almost too clean and quiet sidewalks and approach Big Tide - a large window on your left nearly swallows you. It's the dinning room which sits nearly level with the sidewalk. If you see this window - you're almost there. A few steps up the hill, take a left and descend into this bastion of a bar where the denizens' beer mugs wait, named, for a pour. Order the hemp ale.
I found that this small, local microbrewery is a place that has exactly what any lonesome traveler on the Beer Trail could possibly need. Beer brewed with hemp (it doesn't taste like rope despite Chris' facetious description), a seasonal brew, an extra special bitter and a brown ale that tastes nothing like a brown!
Superb beer brewing is happening here.
After your 3rd or 4th beer ... you may need food. The menu opens onto a range of options ... I settled for the Maritimes' bounty ... a selection of mussels from the Bay of Fundy. I can almost taste the fast-recedeing waters over mudflats as the flocks of sandpipers that have gathered on their journey to and from the Arctic to gorge themselves on mud shrimp.
The BeerFredo Mussels are excellent. What I wouldn't give for a plate of them now ... soaking their last minutes on earth - plucked from the sea - marinated in cream and beer. Heavenly.
But the taste of New Brunswick, it's seafood, it's charm and above all it's beer will have to wait until when on another journey earns the appropriate stamps in my Beer Passport. Good luck Big Tide Brewing on mapping New Brunswick's Beer Trail!
cheers!
@aclintonb
http://www.bigtidebrew.com/
