The new section of the Henry Hudson Trail in Freehold could open any day.
Time for an update on the Henry Hudson Trail.
Continue reading “I biked to Freehold for the Henry Hudson Trail and ended up in a brewery”What would it be like to use the D&R Canal towpath and then Amwell Road to reach Flounder?
Flounder Brewery moved into a renovated old farmhouse last year (still in Hillsborough) and now has lots of indoor and outdoor seating. We biked once from Duke Farm and then via roads to the D&R Canal towpath at the Griggstown Causeway.
But what would it be like to bike almost all the way using the canal towpath? Time to find out with this route.
Continue reading “A new way to bike to the new Flounder Brewing site”Beautiful scenery, but oh those climbs!
First, the rolling hills of upper Bucks County mean the scenery is gorgeous, even if my iPhone photography skills can’t do them justice. The roads through the woods, with a stony creek alongside. And then the old stone homes.
But getting out of the river valley to the top of those hills? That’s another matter. Hard work! Or perhaps that’s the danger of just taking a random ride off Ride With GPS and there is an easier (and less trafficked) climb than Upper York Road? What should we have done instead?
Continue reading “Biking Bucks County covered bridges to New Jersey beer”The D&;R Canal and the Lawrence Hopewell Trail get you within 30 minutes by bike of River Horse Brewing in Ewing, New Jersey.
Time for another “weird beer” ride. This time we decided to try one of the big boys.
Continue reading “A bike ride to River Horse Brewing in Ewing, New Jersey”Old Hights brewery is just off Main Street in Hightstown, N.J.
We heard about a new micro (nano?) brewery not far away… so we had another destination for a bike ride.
Old Hights Brewing Co. is just off Main Street in Hightstown. So after a 36-mile ride into the Sourlands and a bit of chilling at home the other weekend, we found the energy for a fast-paced 7.5 miles to pick up a four-pack.
Here’s what we learned:
Continue reading “We bike to yet another New Jersey brewery… and there is socially distanced outdoor seating”WFH = I’m eating too much. I need a bike ride. Where to?
It’s not even been a week of working from home and staying indoors a lot. This is going to be hard. I’m eating too much, even if I (futilely) try to barricade the door to the kitchen. I can always go outside to fight the war against the evil hairy bittercress weed that would take over the yard in a heartbeat, of course. But sometimes you just need a bike ride.
Saturday afternoon was sunny and fairly warm (missed the true hot day on Friday because, you know, work). Where to go?
I’d been getting emails most of the week from Flounder Brewing, that nano brewery we checked out last fall as part of my “weird beer” rides. I couldn’t tell if they were still open and selling crowlers (32-ounce cans), but we figured it was as good a destination as any. 17 miles each way, a mix of trail and road.
Continue reading “Going stir-crazy over coronavirus — so let’s bike to support a small brewery”The latest search for weird beer took us to one of the fastest-growing craft breweries in the U.S.
Two beers were in contention for the weirdest beer at Flounder Brewing, a fast-growing nanobrewery in Hillsborough, NJ. There was the “off-menu” pumpkin spice latte ale, with a milk chocolate cream to confound the flavor profile even more, as well as a beer called the “Pitmaster” described as an “amber ale brewed with smoked malts and maple syrup.”
Being a non-coffee drinker, the choice was easy: the Pitmaster. Just three bucks for 7 ounces.
The smokiness hit me first, as if I had barbecue in my mouth. That faded as I sipped more, putting the maple syrup more forward, horrifying my beer aficianado friends. I’d rather have the smokiness. (Actually, I’d rather have some real BBQ, but this bikes and BBQ ride isn’t for a few more weeks.)
Continue reading “‘Weird beer,’ part 4: This one tastes like barbecue”The third beer ride of 2019. Destination: Neshaminy Creek Brewing in Croyon, Pa.
After cycling to Screamin’ Hill Brewery and the Referend Bier Blendery this summer, our next beer destination was the award-winning Neshaminy Creeek Brewing Co. in the Philadelphia suburb of Croydon.
Our 13-mile route was mostly on trail, giving the six of us a chance to chat rather than keep a mindful eye on motorists and making sure we didn’t miss a turn. Even better, we got to explore a section of the D&L Heritage Trail that is now fully open to Bristol, unlike our (still-fun) experience last year that involved following some dirt trails to get around blockages. Plus this will soon officially become part of the East Coast Greenway. What an improvement on the Trenton-to-Philadelphia route we rode a few years ago! (For a fresher report on the route to Philadelphia, click here.)
Here’s how we did it:
Continue reading “A milkshake latte IPA? Another bike ride to yet more ‘weird beer’”We found beer made using spontaneous fermentation and the technique of the ancients. And then (modern) ice cream.
Last month’s bike ride to Screamin’ Hill sparked a discussion of other area breweries — places I, as someone who doesn’t love beer, hadn’t heard of. But, hey, they make good bike-ride destinations. And the one four of us cycled to on Sunday definitely is out of the ordinary.
You see, the Referend Bier Blendery in Pennington (or perhaps it’s really Hopewell Township) believes in using the bacteria in the air for spontaneous fermentation. I’m not going to claim I understood everything about this approach, which goes back to the ancients and has at its core “as little interference as possible” in the process. But even I know that using a truck parked outside to house “The Coolship” is out of the ordinary.
Continue reading “A bike ride to even weirder beer in New Jersey”Screamin’ Hill brewery is 17 miles from the West Windsor library and not much further from the Princeton Junction train station.
I’ve given quite a few talks on biking in New Jersey, and I always talk about the sites you’ll discover and how anything can be a destination. One example I use is Screamin’ Hill brewery, a farm brewery in the middle of rural New Jersey. And then I realized that aside from our first ride there (when it was closed), I’ve never given it its own blog post, just shared billing.
Time to fix that, and its fourth anniversary was a good excuse. Plus we wanted a shot at the free anniversary mugs. Little did we know that it opened two hours earlier than usual! The only reason we came home with one was because someone abandoned it by the plastic cups and one of the riders in the group was kind enough to hand it to us.
We discovered this place thanks to an article in Edible Jersey that described it as New Jersey’s first (and as of then only) farm brewery. Most of what goes into the beer is grown on the farm, and they have some funky offerings (what some friends would call “weird beer”). There’s IPA, wheat beer, fruit beer, pilsner, sour and more. Even one with tomato. So, yeah, you could say that’s weird. (I had the tomato one once. It doesn’t taste anything remotely like tomato juice mixed with beer.) Among the five beer drinkers I was with, however, one called his choice the best beer he’d had in a long time. Another noted how fresh the beers are.
What’s on tap varies according to what’s ready, and when they run out of something, they run out. Hours are incredbily limited — 3 pm to 8 pm on Fridays and 1 pm to 6 pm on Saturdays. BYO food. Really. It’s a very casual, picnic atmosphere with a few kids running around. (But no dogs.) We started out in the sun and ended up sprawled under a shady tree.
Even if you’re not much of a beer drinker, it’s a lovely bike ride. Once you get to the other side of US 130, the roads are pretty quiet, with a little bit of up and down as you get close to the farm (whose address, after all, includes the word hill).
Continue reading “You want to bike to this New Jersey farm brewery for ‘weird beer’”
Exploring by bicycle 