Sessio #5 (Feb 2018): Beer travel

This post is a part of Sessio, Finnish beer bloggers' monthly posts on the same topic. The topic is selected by a monthly changing host. This topic was selected by Arde arvioi, who will wrap up the Sessio posts in his blog. I will take part in Sessio whenever the subject feels nice and I have time to write a post.

For this month's Sessio, Arde selected beer travel as the topic. The topic suits me nicely, even though I'm not an experienced beer trekker. That's just the way it is, and that's the way it'll probably be until the end. Just a couple of little flaws crack my snifter and prevent me from being a keen beer globetrotter.

I don't have the money for beer travel. My monthly pay goes to mortgage, electricity, water, gasoline, home insurance, the Internet cable and the waste disposal. Besides that there's the family with different kind of needs: wife wants to decorate the garden and kids have their hobbies. Plus we all eat food bought from the grocery store - no free lunches nor dinners for the whole family. Of course, someone might consider it rude and arrogant to even propose canceling the family holiday plans - or moving to a smaller house, eating cheaper food or lowering the standard of everybody's everyday life - just because Daddy wants to fly to the States alone to have a pint or two of fresh West Coast IPA. And that would be rather justified to think that way.

I don't have the time for beer travel. When the time is divided between work, home/family and sleeping, I wonder that there is any "my own time" at all. Well, of course there is - at it's best even a couple of days in a row. Mostly though, if I have more than 24 hours of idle i.e. non-programmed time, I like spend it with the people I love most: wife, kids, even the whole family, friends, parents and all other than not-in-law people in the world. Spending time in traveling - moving from the place I am to the place I want to be - presents the lowest quality time for me. The shorter the period spent in the target is, the more useless the time spent in traveling feels. In the rare cases where I travel for beer to participate in a beer festival in Finland, the beer is the necessary excuse to spend time with a friend or to do something completely different in the city where the festival takes place.

I don't find beer an important enough reason for traveling. Of course, beer would surely taste better and fresher if it's enjoyed near the brewing place. Of course, the atmosphere for enjoying beer is more unique and original near the home of that specific beer. Of course, drinking beer in various destinations would expand my experiences of beer to something that can't be achieved without traveling. Yes, but still for me it's only beer. I tend to choose the destinations of my spare time trips by the things that can be actually done or that can be seen in the destination rather than checking out the beer scene. If I'm not too enthusiastic traveler in general, why should beer turn me to a keen one? I don't need traveling to fill up some kind of experience vacuum, since the smaller, cheaper and less distant experiences reserve that space well enough. Why should I travel to California or Vermont for any reason, if I can get a better personal experience e.g. while playing in the local swimming hall with kids, working out on the crossbar in a nearby park or riding my bike in a cold, horizontally draining rain? Life without beercations might sound flat and boring, but for me that's simple and happy life.

However, for some unexplainable reason, during the last couple of years, I seem to have learned to enjoy the short moments of my working trips - couple of hours in the evening or the last hour before the train leaves - in a local beer restaurant or pub. Here are some pictures from the visits in this February, so this blogpost won't be totally dry.

Turku, 8 February 2018

    

Radbar - Radbrew Total Blackout Porter

Mallaskukko - Amager Bringer of Summer

Tampere, 13 & 15 February 2018

Konttori - Amager/Barrier The Mortician

Konttori - Wylam Jakehead IPA

Konttori - Amager/Barrier The Mortician (2nd take)

Konttori - Maku/Machine Sea Buckthorn IPA

Helsinki, 19 February 2018

Black Door - Cool Head DDH Ipanema

Black Door - Cool Head CITRACITRACITRA

Black Door - Plevnan Tropic Bomb

Ölbeat

If it wasn't clear before this post, now it is: I don't know shit about beer travel. And I don't want to. I'm enjoying my life here at Land's Edge. And I know the essential difference between the traveler and the tourist.

David Lee Roth: Land's Edge (YouTube)

From the 1994 album Your Filthy Little Mouth, the song was written by Terry Kilgore and David Lee Roth.