Don't drive, HIKE! to the brewery
Trek to these trailside breweries in New England
As someone who writes about hiking, I get asked about breweries a lot.
“Where can I get an ice-cold double IPA after climbing Mount Lafayette?” is probably the most common inquiry. But occasionally the questions veer into weirder territory such as, “Do you know if Rock Art’s Vermont Spruce Stout is brewed with authentic Northeast Kingdom spruce tips?” When I co-wrote Moon New England Hiking back in 2018, I was instructed to focus my food-and-beverage coverage on craft breweries specifically. (Hell, the sub-headline of the book is “Best Hikes plus Beer, Bites, and Campgrounds Nearby.”) So why has beer become the intuitive bedfellow to hiking?
When you think about it, brewing beer isn’t entirely dissimilar to hiking. You start with this fairly simple concept—a walk outdoors, or a gruel of water, barley, and yeast—and from there, you build on that concept by adding more esoteric elements like glacial boulders, mosaic hops, river crossings, or smoked malts. (Side note: I just had a beer.)
Consider Acadia’s iconic Ocean Path. The carved stone staircases along the cliffs offer the same decadence as a beer like chocolate stout or tart blueberry gose. But the ocean, never out of sight or earshot, is the common denominator here—just like those timeless backbone ingredients of whatever beer you’re sipping after your hike.
OR…maybe beer just tastes even better when you’re soaked in sweat and your cheeks are flushed and chigger bites are forming on your calves. This could be the answer.
In any event, I suspect the marriage of beer and hiking will continue after all of us are tapped, unless the world runs out of hops or something. There have been ingredient shortages before, and this cycle has been called “The Hop Pendulum” (which sounds like the title of a Clive Cussler paperback.) But today, as the winter freeze makes the fleeting warmth of a beer all the more alluring, I want to devote today’s newsletter to a craft beer question that nobody asked me yet, to my surprise and disappointment.
Can you hike to breweries in New England?
I love the idea of reaching the end of a trail and staggering up to a bar where someone with impressive sleeve tattoos hooks you up with a bock lager as you take off your backpack, ready to get mildly buzzed and not quite ready to think about your return journey. In Switzerland and Italy, there are mountaintop huts that offer libations to hikers who’ve wheezed their way to the front door. In America, unfortunately, getting from the trail to the bar top is almost always going to require some require driving.
But the key word here is “almost.”
Recently, I’ve taken some hikes, placed some calls, and I’ve produced a shortlist of New England breweries that you can reach by hiking trails! To make the list, each of these breweries had to be accessible via paths and hiking routes that pass through interesting rural and urban green spaces. It wasn’t easy, but in the end, I was able to find breweries that fit this basic criterion in all six New England states…
Two caveats before we begin the rundown. Enjoy the catharsis of a fresh beer after your hike, but bear in mind that you’ll need to hike back to your vehicle on most of the hikes listed here. Be strategic. And if you’d prefer to avoid imbibing indoors right now, given the Covid factor, you could buy a 4-pack of cans from the brewery, crack one on the trail, and savor those malt notes while admiring the frozen streams and the pale glow of the winter sun. I’m not endorsing this, you understand, but…it’s something that hikers such as myself have done before. If you try this, then you probably want to do it in the country and not in the middle of a city park. But as long as you keep your beer can fairly concealed and stick to a quieter area, it’s unlikely that cops will hassle you.
And now, before I get myself into trouble, here are New England’s hike-able breweries!
Black Hog Brewing Co (Oxford, CT): Perhaps the purest trail-to-brewery hike on this list, Black Hog Brewing Co is nestled in the woods near Waterbury, offering not only a terrific “granola brown ale,” but a spur path that leads from the brewery to the Larkin Bridle Trail—a gentle 10.4 mile path through tunnels of arbors. You can basically “put in” anywhere along the Larkin Bridle Trail and hike through the woods to the brewery, but this video tutorial by Brian Krilivsky outlines a 2 mile out-and-back route. Wherever you choose to set off from, look for a black pig-shaped logo spray painted on a tree. This marks the spur path to the brewery. CLICK HERE FOR TRAIL INFORMATION.